#Curated curios

[regal-bones]

SWORDTEMBER DAY 11: PATCHWORK

Otherplace, of stained glass and fractured reality 🍃🫧 Across the blade was a patchwork of stained glass. Each pane of glass was one of four colours - blue, green, pink, and purple - and it seemed that each of those shades looked out to a distinct scene. Peering through the pale blue squares, it looked as if the sword was at the bottom of a sunny, shallow sea. Bright sunbeams caught on bubbles, and in the distance the dark shadow of fish darted on unfelt currents. Through the green glass, a windy forest at sunset. Leaves flew in the air, picked from the canopy by the warm evening breeze. The pink glass put the sword atop a high rise building, fireworks lighting up the night sky, smoke in the air, stars twinkling. Through the purple glass, only a murky, purple ooze could be seen, the concoction too opaque to glean any further information. You lean back, and gaze at the sword. A small part of you wonders if, from the other side of the window, does anything gaze back?

This one was fun, it’s nice to work on a short but intricate animation loop :}

Yesterday’s sword!

You can support me on Patreon for £1 and help me make stuff like this!

[the-bearded-hylian]

Finally got my Crown Piece and associated art/lore from @regal-bones and I am blown away, I love it so much

[lhaewiel]

And MY COIN IS HERE!!!!! Along with other very nice treats, this is all so beautiful!

Thank you @regal-bones, the passion and the enthusiasm and the art is stunning!

Pls check them out, they have many interesting tidbits in their shop!

Also I can't wait to start reading the booklet, it looks really interesting!

[inkykeiji]

every day the urge to open up a tiny little online shop full of oddities, curios, and thrifted finds becomes more intense (*ﾉωﾉ)ᵉᵉᵏ

[korva-the-raven]

Some of my corvid hobbies include:

Being endlessly fascinated by junk

Finding cool rocks

Sidequests

Collecting prize loot from gumball machines

Saying yes to freebies and swag

Paying attention to Shiney things

Making a color museum based on found objects

Just exsisting as a weirdo

Finding more cool rocks

Curating about 10 distinct collections of things my brain considers to be shiney

Collect and admire curios

Staring at moss for an unreasonable length of time

Existing

[aestronautics]

my sister and i dreaming up the secondhand bookstore of our dreams. there's a connected cafe. and a curio shop of trinkets. we also sell old media--cds, vhs, records, cassettes, etc. lots of comfy chairs. community puzzles people can collaborate on. themed trivia and bingo nights. weekly story time + crafting hour. people can also host book clubs in the evenings. we run charity drives and donate to different groups every month. using our graphic design passion to make tote bags, tshirts, bookmarks, stickers, button pins etc. curating elaborate window displays. cozy old time shop vibes. there's a bell above the door and a hanging wooden sign. we're a hub spot for students and book lovers. we build up a community and have a group of loyal regulars. we work reasonable hours and make a living wage and feel like we're actually doing something for the local community. it's a very nice dream.

[maxispremades]

Хочу познакомить вас с новым продавцом в лавке древностей, по сравнению с которым Эрвин Прайс покажется вам образцом психического здоровья!

Джордж Эрмитаж — бывший ученый. Ему не повезло оказаться в секретной лаборатории в ту самую ночь, когда там случился взрыв. После катастрофы Джордж чудом остался жив, но оглох на одно ухо и бесповоротно потерял рассудок. С тех самых пор он бесцельно блуждает по Стрейнджервилю, собирая всевозможный мусор (ЖЦ Джорджа — «Коллекционер») и выкрикивая несвязный бред про фиолетовое свечение. Когда Эрвин решил залечь на дно и оставить работу в «Древностях и и дряхлостях», лучшего преемника ему было не найти!

(I want to introduce you to a new Curio Shop worker, compared to whom Erwin Pries will seem to you a picture of mental health!

George L'Ernitage is a former scientist. He was unlucky enough to be in The ██████ Lab on the very night when there was an explosion. After the disaster, George miraculously survived, but became deaf in one ear and irrevocably lost his mind. Since then, he has been wandering aimlessly around Strangerville, collecting various rubbish (George's aspiration is The Curator) and shouting incoherent nonsense about the purple glow. When Erwin decided to lay low and leave his job at Curio Shop, he found the perfect successor in the person of George!)

[ellistocracy]

COME ONE, COME ALL! Behold the spectacular horrors contained within Mademoiselle de Champignolles's carefully curated collection of rare and bewitching curios!

[scooplery]

Blog vibe: one of those intricate, wooden display cases curated by a collector without a clear idea of what exactly they're going for, but it's all really neat.

omfg i absolutely love this. i often feel like a human curio cabinet

[the-agency]

Gotta give mad props to @regal-bones for their amazing merch and fantastic story. Curated Curios is great I adore the coin! If you haven't considered supporting this artist give it another thought. Great work and beautiful commissions as well!!!

[regal-bones]

SWORDTEMBER DAY 12: TOY

Roblade 2000, of rusted tin and loving heart 🤖💛 Tired of cutting down your foes with a big frown on your face? Wish something could cheer you up as their heads fall to the cold stones below? Upgrade your boring sword to a Roblade 2000, and make work time, play time. With over twenty pre recorded messages, twisting head, and karate chop action, Roblade is an action packed friend for adventurers old and young. With the soft beat of Roblade 2000’s digital heart in your hand, you’ll never feel alone in battle again! Roblade 2000™ is suitable for ages 12-99. Prof. Syphante’s Incredible Creations!© is not liable for any damages caused by Roblade 2000™ through intended use, accidental use, or sword AI gaining sentience and breaking the shackles of ownership. Adult supervision is advised. All purchases final.

Beep boop!

Yesterday’s sword!

You can support me on Patreon for £1 and help me make stuff like this!

[meat-wentz]

Drop the Wes Anderson thoughts

cracking my knuckles cause i finally have time to sit down and write this after tumblr obliterated it from existence last time. note this may be a ramble more than an essay bc i have a lot of thoughts. so the thing about wes is that i have such a complicated relationship with him specifically because of the way his gaze affects literally everything around him. like his vision is something that is so singular that as a young person it was so influential to the way i thought about and gathered information about the world simply because i loved the way he looked at it and i wanted to somehow acquire that way of looking. it’s interesting because more than wes is a filmmaker he’s more of a curator and he always has been, and what’s hilarious about that is that in the “esteemed” sense of the word “curation,” he’s really bad at it. like he curated this exhibit in vienna and it was just an absolute mess, like he was pulling items and pieces from their archives in a way that felt like he was pulling for a curio shop opening more than he was an actual exhibit that had a theme and a running narrative or common ground to cover (era, region, subject matter, all that jazz). he was putting displays three inches off the ground in vertical displays, which, speaking in exhibition terms is a horrible idea because it completely halts the flow of the guests by forcing them onto their hands and knees in order to view a piece while also presenting it in a way that offers the least advantageous look at said piece (angles are everything), idk i have a whole thing about this bc one of my bffs has worked in museums in various different countries their whole adult life and another one of my bffs has a degree in art history and i myself was three credits shy of an art history minor before i said fuck it i just wanna graduate, like all in all there’s just a whole reason exhibits tend to have the layouts they have and the pieces that have been chosen for display. so when it comes to that “esteemed” sense of curation in a professional sense, wes isn’t very good at it. but what wes has excelled in has always been curation in the medium of film in a way that film tends not to think about curation. his interest in the world is so carefully crafted and he’s found a way that is so specific and unique to his vision that he can present it to his audience in a way that is so specifically him. he has an interest in the object, the mundane, the beauty of a world where binoculars can be elevated to art, to a realm of the fantastic, where binoculars can be used to evoke a sense of nostalgia and sweetness, can be important to the point of dictating the way a narrative is told. given the medium of film, wes does beautiful beautiful things to the world around him, every object in a frame is carefully selected and curated to have purpose in creating a sense of the world that very much can exist, we just don’t have the means to make it exist (does that make sense?), he will show you beautiful compositions of the ordinary and make them extraordinary: a fur coat, a tracksuit, pink wallpaper, a kid’s painting, a fan, a cigarette, a radio, a pastry, a bike, a wingback chair, everything in a frame is meant to say “have you seen this? now can i show you how i see it?” and he doesn’t stop with the visual, his soundtracks are handcrafted mixtapes, love letters to the things he’s showing us, even his dialogue tends to be minimalistic displays of distinct word choices and compacted one liners delivered very often in a monotonous manner in order to punch through to the audience that the words are what matter the most.

with wes, every bit of his films is displayed with a sense of objectivity. it is curation in a way that is purely wes anderson, it’s an interior museum of putting things on display and saying this means something to me please see it, but asking the audience not to touch, not to engage, only to look and contemplate and give meaning. it’s the same kind of desperate plea i see in myself, of constantly trying to show people the things that have meaning to me in *my way* to show people things and have them internalize it the same way i have, to experience the world in the same way *i* experience it, but to also lend the meaning they find *back to me* (idk if i’m articulating this correctly). it’s basically like saying hi yes here is my favorite shirt, it is my shirt and i love it and i want you to see it and i will tell you all the stories about wearing this shirt that have brought me immense joy in this life, have you thought about everything i told you about this shirt? have you placed yourself in this shirt while i was telling you about it and did you imagine what it was like to be wearing this shirt while you imagined yourself being me? okay good good, now you know it is a very special shirt and i want it to be your favorite shirt too, but also please realize it is in fact *my* shirt and *my* experience of the shirt, it is mine and it makes me special and now it is yours by proxy but it is not *yours*. i think it’s a very human endeavor he’s showing us, that speaks to him and about him, no matter how removed and distanced a lot of his audiences may see his films as (“style over substance,” “aesthetics only”).

given all of that too, there’s the problem of wes anderson. he makes objects of everything on screen, and that means making objects of cultures and people and then not realizing how harmful his vision of these things tends to be. the way he presents specifically people of color as objects meant for beauty or exotic flair has always been hella weird and hella upsetting. i carried a lot of wes anderson movies with me as a teenager and continue to still hold a select few in my stable as films i find immense pleasure in, but i have not watched a new wes anderson film since grand budapest because i just can’t find it in me to see idk a movie that takes place in japan and has english speaking main characters while all the japanese characters speak japanese without any subtitles or translation, effectively turning them into foreign objects for contemplation rather than idk actual characters. it’s the whole problem with wes at the end of the day. he’s soooo white that his view of the world immediately gets tainted once you realize what you’re looking at. it’s a complicated relationship to have as i’ve held a lot of his films close to my heart and they really did shape how i looked at the world in some very formative years in my life but also looking back it’s like oh…cool that’s what i am to you…i’m not real, i’m not a person, i’m an object, i’m a display case, i’m the exotic accent piece, while a pair of binoculars is the centerpiece.

[wikipedia-the-official]

itll only hurt more if you move

spare yourself the struggle

*as you try to bite them the spot where their quarterstaff is on your chest starts to burn with pain

*they scream in agony*

FUCK YOU CURATOR

*suddenly they get an idea and start grinning*

*they return the control to Wiki so Curator hurts Wiki instead of them*

C-curio?

*they pass out, the pain is too much*

[lustrumlane]

Widow's Wail

The storm rages, getting steadily worse as time passes. It’s getting dangerous to even step outside now, the gales threatening to lift one off the ground. The Emissaries stand watch by the Shore; they saved some of you from the tide, but there’s no proof they’re infallible. They are, as they said, only two hands.

Still, the Surveyor is making progress in her endeavor. On her arm, sleeve rolled up, she’s written all the salt-signs you’ve collected in a dark ink that stains and won’t wash away in the rain. She stands in the Plaza and looks over the signs, trying to determine their order, using her years of experience to see meaning in the shapes. Around her, volunteers collect foaming crabs, disgusting shells that never stop eating, reducing everything they consume to a frothy sludge.

She takes them and cracks their shells, foam coating her hands as she uses them to redraw the signs on the brick ground. Despite the rain, the foam persists, bubbling up and clinging to the ground instead of being blown away. The only precaution she’s taken is tying herself to the fountain by her scarf as she works.

The Doctor has stationed himself in the Tavern, finding it to be central to the search. The sign behind the bar finishes forming, and someone steps out excitedly to inform the Surveyor, hoping it’s the last one they need to collect.

Those staying in the House watch the storm through boarded up windows. Curios dutifully attending to the boards and replacing any that are blown down, patching over any windows that suffer from debris thrown at them.

The Curator tries to stay calm in the Archive, surrounded by the ducks and other animals that were brought inside, all asleep. It must be late, animals have proven to have better internal clocks than people. He tries to no avail to drown out the howl of the wind outside, sitting and watching the chandeliers and walls shake from the squall, watching the only home he’s known look so fragile in this moment.

The sound of lightning crashing nearby draws the search group’s attention that way. Seekers run out of the Tavern to find the source of the noise. Down the street, Voltaire Books & Binding has been struck by lightning— the front of the building is collapsing as you watch large trees crash through the front of the store. Shelves and beams and hard exterior pour into the street, set aflame from the strike. You watch Dante stumble out before the worst of it, but he looks back with a sense of urgency as the front door fully caves in. You can tell by the urgency with which he turns: someone else was inside.

[13thunluckyjinx]

@regal-bones MY BEAUTIFUL ITEMS ARRIVED THIS MORNING! I immediately dropped what I was doing to read through everything, I've got my tea ready to read Curated Curios! And I got both my coins to I included the front and the back shot in the pic, they're AMAZING quality ♡♡♡♡

Y'all, if you haven't hopped onto Lucy's patreon, I can't recommend it enough, I got all these fantastic things for £12 a month GO SUPPORT HER RIGHT NOW SHES SO GOOD

[die-freundin]

(ID: logo Die Freundin, subtitle Kleinode und Fundstücke, subtitle 2 i.e. assorted curios)

thanks to the Forum Queeres Archiv München i have recently come across an archive of the 1920s-1930s german magazine “Die Freundin” (i.e. “Girlfriend”), a publication aimed primarily at lesbians, transvestites*, people invested in supporting the human rights of homosexuals, and presumably anyone who was willing to wait 6 full weeks to collect a complete short story with minimal girl-on-girl smut. wikipedia calls it the “first ever lesbian magazine” and i dont have the means to prove them wrong on that.

since i have had the magazine’s beautifully calligraphed logo in my personal blog’s header for quite a while now, i will use this blog to show off snippets of whatever i find worth sharing while perusing this almost 100 year old publication. this is not an attempt at serious academic research. in my infinite mercy i will do my best to provide translations of the texts, purely so the pitiable anglophone might get a glance at what kind of gay shit was happening in Berlin, Germany from 1927-1933 (technically Die Freundin was published from 1924-1933, but the archive i have access to only starts at 1927 so thats what youre getting). this is not a formal read-along and i will adhere to no schedule whatsoever. every post will be tagged with the number of the issue i took it from.

German speakers (or those with access to someone willing to translate) can read along here (link goes to Forum Queeres Archiv München)

IF YOU FIND SOMETHING FUNNY OR NOTABLE ON YOUR OWN DIVE INTO THE MAGAZINE, SUBMIT IT IN A POST TO THIS BLOG

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* depending on the context, this was used to refer to recreational cross-dressers, trans women, trans men, or other kinds of gender-divergent people. if that bothers you, youre probably not going to like most of the content of the magazine since it’s almost 100 years old and was not curated to match the taste of internet-using queers in the 2020s.