#I couldn't see it when I checked

[pushing500]

Wait why are they ALL bisexual? What was happening on that ship?

I have a mod (two mods, actually: Sexuality Traits and Rational Romance 2) that assigns every pawn a sexuality (gay, straight, bisexual, or asexual). I think bisexual is the "default" one.

The majority of my colony is bi. There are only 12 out of 29 colonists who aren't bi, and only 7 of those 12 are straight. The others are gay or asexual.

But yes, there was potential for some wild shenanigans on that ship! Perhaps that's what caused the space battle that destroyed them?

[r0semultiverse]

Small indie artists in need of support for moving out by September!

💜 These lovely folks [@QuinsCurse (they/them) & @sswitchblade03 (xe/xem and he/him)] are part of a small queer-owned Youtube community I'm in. 💖

💖 If you could lend a helping hand by reblogging & queueing this post up until the start of September, I'd greatly appreciate it & I'm sure these fine folks would too! 💜

⚠️ Do not tag as d*nations or anything like that! ⚠️

"Hi everyone! Requests are officially closed as I am opening emergency commissions! Please consider supporting me as we are getting kicked out and have managed to find a place that’s affordable but need to save up 5k by the end of the month! Anything helps! I also have a dontations page if you are willing to help do that! All the money received from commissions will be going to the deposit! https://ko-fi.com/quinscurse/commissions https://ko-fi.com/quinscurse/goal?g=32"

⚠️ Do not tag as d*nations or anything like that! ⚠️

"https://ko-fi.com/sswitchblade03/commissions https://ko-fi.com/sswitchblade03/goal?g=0 EMERGENCY COMMISSIONS!! My roommate ‪@QuinsCurse‬and I are needing about $5000CAD for a down payment on a new place as we need to be out of our current place by September! Every bit counts! My goal is to be set to $3000CAD. I will draw anything (coloured and rendered) for $5 CAD each! If you are willing to give more it will be appreciated. Examples of my work below!"

⚠️ Do not tag as d*nations or anything like that! ⚠️

[front-facing-pokemon]

[msnihilist]

Thinkin' about "didn't know they were dating" Phinabella but Isabella is the one who doesn't know.

She's been pining for years and finally can't take it anymore and blurts out that she's in love with him, and Phineas immediately and enthusiastically returns the sentiment, saying that he's glad she's finally felt comfortable enough to say it after all this time. (Isabella is loading, but manages to say, "what?")

Turns out that Phineas always returned her feelings, he just doesn't show them in big, flowery ways like he does in her fantasies. ("You didn't think Paris was romantic? I had so much fun looking for airplane parts together!" and "You've always been special to me, Isabella. I don't treat Buford or Baljeet like I treat you." and "You always seemed so nervous, I didn't want to push it." and "I'm happy as long as you're around, anyway — we don't have to be holding hands or kissing.")

Isabella is casually having an existential crisis as years of their friendship recontextualizes itself in her head. Phineas is waiting for her to finish processing very patiently. (He's waited this long, after all.) And with the confusion cleared up, they both agree to "continue" "dating" and have their first kiss 💕🥺

[killjoy-prince]

House M.D. but it's when a character says the name of the episode

[sealwomyn]

I wanted to share this informative little comic for International (Working) Women's Day:

[kyonshi-8610]

サニー坊っちゃん

(なんか未完成。もう諦めたよ)

[flyingcakeee]

Can't even be on TikTok..

Again, let's look at the full picture of how it was a chain reaction that was bound to happen when everyone bunches up like that when you should've taken the corner as you previously did under the safety car so Lance has some fault but it's literally not entirely his and yeah..

Also, Lance locked up because he desperately tried to brake so he did use his brake ^^ His tyres weren't allowing him to brake because of the lockup ^^

[symphonyofsilence]

Daily reminder that most of the sect members follow their sect leaders because they were born to that sect, or that sect was stable and powerful enough to provide them with security, and the Wen Remnants followed Wei Wuxian even though they were afraid of him because that was their only option, but the YMJ members that followed Jiang Cheng ever since the Sunshot Campaign freely CHOSE to do so. He was 17. And an extremely traumatized seventeen-year-old at that. He was simultaneously looking for his brother and participating in a war while rebuilding his sect. Lotus Pier was destroyed. There were only 3 people left of the YMJ sect (2 as far as they knew with WWX missing.) The sect was brought to ruins. The YMJ sect couldn't have had much riches left. But the new sect (and they were enough for YMJ to be called a sect again) CHOSE to follow Jiang Cheng.

[jerrythebug]

I got Guy fever yesterday, I think I died.

[egophiliac]

you don't play on the en server?

nope, I play JP! been there since day one, babyyyy ✌️

I do sometimes try to check in on where EN is, but it's not always super clear (I think they might've finished episode 6? except in only two parts...?) so I try to spoiler-tag over-judiciously just in case. :') though I did see it's getting Kelkkarotu soon, which is -- well okay the first part kind of drags but once it picks up it's one of my favorites, I'm excited for EN to get it! REVEL IN THE COMFY WINTER OUTFITS

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 7: A. A. Dixon

"'Collins' Clear-Type Press, let me ask you a question.'"

This is a very long post.

This week's edition has, in my research, become quite the edition.

Sadly, this image is the best source for the cover wrapper illustration that I could find.

You are likely familiar with Arthur Augustus Dixon's illustrations for the 1905 Collins Pocket Edition of A Tale of Two Cities. Several of them are very common to find in Internet searches and articles about the book, if not other editions of the book itself.

But the question raised by my research for this week's edition is: Are you familiar with all of them?

Thing is, as the source above states (read the whole article if you have the time, it's very interesting!), Dixon created twelve illustrations for this novel.

And sure enough, this source from the Internet Archive and this source from @oldillustrations (hello!) both have eleven of the same illustrations - with the twelfth presumably being for the wrapper, as seen in this source (previously cited) from the Victorian Web.

Alright, so that's three separate sources, all with (effectively) the same set of elaborate illustrations from 1905. Neat!

...

...but if you start counting...

...you'll notice that this seems...

...like a lot more than twelve!

Basically, there are five illustrations by A. A. Dixon that are completely unaccounted for in any of the three sources previously cited.

For the purposes of this post, the cover wrapper is considered #0 and is not pictured in these banners.

In full-size set of illustrations in this post, this source from Google Books is the source of four of those mystery illustrations:

#3: "'He stared at her with a fearful look.'" #6: "'Drive him fast to his tomb.'" #7: "He said, 'Farewell!'" #12: "'She appeared with folded arms.'" #9 ("'Patriots and friends, we are ready!'") and #11 ("'You are consigned to La Force.'") are sourced from Google Books in the full-size versions in this post simply because the Internet Archive versions of those two illustrations had cropping issues.

To me, this is mystery enough on its own. Why would another version of the book suddenly have more than the originally-stated number of illustrations by this artist? Especially considering that the Google Books source does not have #13 ("''I know you, Evremonde!''") - why would it be missing one of the "main" set?

It gets even more interesting.

As you'll notice in the banner, we're still one off: Keen-eyed observers of the full-size set of illustrations might have already noticed that #14 ("'Carton and the spy returned.'") looks a bit different than the rest of them - a bit like what happened in the previous edition of this series!

That's because that Dixon illustration comes from this completely random source - a post from a blog called the Paperback Palette dating back to 2018 - that I happened across on Google Images of all places while sitting on an airplane trying to set up this post last week!

And to top it all off, that source is missing #6!

At this point, if your first instinct is, reasonably, that perhaps Dixon didn't actually illustrate these extra five and that it was someone imitating him for later editions, then know that that was my instinct too - until I (dare I say it again) checked those signatures!!!

(I edited the colors to prevent flashing.)

All five of those illustrations bear Dixon's signature, so it's safe to assume that they are A. A. Dixon originals - from 1905, even.

Interestingly, #s 1, 10, 13, 15, and 16 don't have signatures! Does this mean anything? Probably not - as an artist myself, I often forget to put my own signature - but still, I can't resist mentioning it!

So the most likely explanation here is simply that the publishing house originally commissioned A. A. Dixon for more than twelve illustrations and then held on to some of them, eventually choosing to publish them in other editions. Still, we can't say for sure.

And as to why some are missing from the more "complete" sets - human error, most likely!

If you scrub through the Google Books source, you'll notice that #s 11 and 12 actually repeat (one even changes color, which I have no explanation for) - it's most likely either that the book was accidentally printed with repeats of #s 11 and 12 where 13 and 14 were supposed to go or that the person scanning this edition made a similar error.

As an aside, it's so interesting that the illustrations are evenly spaced throughout the book - I had not noticed that until now!

And as for the Paperback Palette source, it's most likely that the blogger accidentally skipped over an image while combing through their edition or just glossed over it when posting the batch (I understand that from experience!) We can see this by adding up the letters in some of the illustrations' captions - doing so reveals that the letters are meant to go to P, the sixteenth letter of the alphabet.

Thus, one must be missing! Case closed!

Except... It's actually (going by both the chronology of the book and the order in which this set was found in Google Books) missing the wrong letter! Here, it seems that In the Google Books source, #7 in the full set is given the seventh letter in the alphabet, G - whereas in the Paperback Palette source, "#7" is labeled as the sixth, F:

This implies not only that #6 is absent from the Paperback Palette source but also that there is a missing mystery illustration located between this source's H and K - that is to say, before or after #9!

EXCEPT... For one, this isn't the only inconsistency I've noticed - there are several places where the letters seem shifted in a strange way. I've seen #2 listed as "C" and #9 listed both as "H" and "I2i" (???), just as two examples. (My theory is that the cover wrapper and the frontispiece may be at play here, but who knows?)

More importantly, though, it seems that, for some mysterious reason, all of the sources with relatively consistent use of these letters (i.e. all but the Victorian Web) - even the sources with only eleven interior illustrations - still give #15 in the full set the fifteenth letter, O. Which, of course, may make all of this pretty moot anyway.

Dare I say..."Oh."

Suffice it to say, just as much as major sources like the Internet Archive and Google Books are vital to this sort of research and preservation work, so are smaller websites and bloggers! After all, without the Victorian Web and the Paperback Palette, we as collective netizens likely wouldn't have ever known about the cover wrapper or illustration #14 (not to mention that the versions of the illustrations from the set posted by @oldillustrations have by far the best image quality and standardization that I've found! Please go check them out if you haven't yet!).

As for the reasons behind Collins' Clear-Type Press not publishing all of the illustrations from the beginning (if that's the explanation we're to go with here), I suppose the question I'd like to ask is:

why? why would you put us through this?

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

[manasurge]

GW2 VS Art Party (oct), of Laerling for @sylvaridreams!! Damaaaa, I loved your pretty icey sylvari!!! They're so cool!!! (metaphorically and physically). Sorry I got a bit carried away and took some artistic liberties~ I gave them icicles and their encased root hair crown into ice as well (based on a really pretty weather phenomenon I've seen irl).

[cold-neon-ocean]

Posting this by itself because :) I just feel like he should have gotten to wear the mech pilot suit at least once..

(my AU black version and the og green)

[celebrimborium]

Dropping 3 episodes at once is such an evil thing to do to gifmakers! Just saying!

(jk I love it)

[hamartia-grander]

Guys do things actually show up in tags if you spell them out in your post but don't tag them or was that person lying to me. I have made posts before that I didn't tag on purpose and I've never seen them show up in the tags I follow even when I spell it out. I'm really thinking that's not a thing that happens.