#and i haven't felt that way in forever

[nikatyler]

I need to figure out a little You're On Your Own, Kid inspired tattoo because that song represents my mental journey of the last five years so well and it means so much to me

[crepuscularqueens]

i bit the fruit and all heaven broke loose

rating: explicit      

archive warning: graphic depictions of violence

Take the most lethal thing you can imagine, and tuck it behind your teeth.

Silver opened his mouth greedily, rewarded with the Flint’s tongue licking in, exploratory and hungry itself.

Let it become part of you, let yourself indulge. Taste this deadly thing, knowing it means you no harm, that it cannot bear to do you any harm.

[image i.d.: still from black sails season 3 episode 7 edited to be black and white, when Silver has returned to the ship after the confrontation with Dufresne and he is receiving medical attention. Silver is sitting on a table, his amputated leg resting on the flat surface while his other leg hangs off. he is gripping the edge of the table tightly. Flint stands slightly behind Silver to the viewers left, looking towards him. Silver is in the middle of speaking.

over the still is the lyrics to the song next life around by KAYE, translucent except for one line reading “I bit the fruit and all heaven broke loose”

end i.d.]

[thedreadvampy]

wait no sorry one last quick immature bitch moment

the more I find out about how this person has behaved in both this relationship and a bunch of other relationships, the funnier it is how much they like to set themselves up as a like. authority on ethical nonmonogamy and consent and conflict management.

when like. they constantly sexually assault people to prove a point, pressure their partners into shit, got into enm by cheating on 3 people concurrently, and literally every time a problem in their orbit is brought up it gets explained away without anything actually changing, or they cry about how hard it is until everyone says OH NO IT'S FINE DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT

you know. very "call yourself a Community Organizer even though you're not on speaking terms with your roommates" energies.

[theo-grayson]

before I played breath of the wild for the first time, i had looked at all sorts of videos and fanart and such of it. i knew what the world looked like, the beauty of it all, far before getting to experience it firsthand. when i played it for the first time, when i saw the opening scene with it's gorgeous visuals, the sweeping landscapes, i found it beautiful, of course. but i always wished that i could have experienced it blind, gotten to explore it for the first time with fresh eyes

i started playing genshin impact recently. i knew very little about it before playing, and even less about what the map looked like.

and i can tell you with certainty that this has been the experience that i had longed for.

god, liyue especially is so breathtaking. these screenshots don't even do it justice. when i finally make it to the top of a mountain, and the music is so ethereal, and the sun is setting in just the right way, and i can see just the most beautiful landscapes. i literally get a rushing feeling in my chest. i just. stand there. in awe of the world in front of me.

and there's still so much i havent seen yet

[anchoredgalaxy]

just finished reading the broken earth trilogy moodboard

[imwritesometimes]

me at 3am today sitting in bed w/my laptop trying not to fall asleep while editing chapter 1 cause I was finally ~in the zone~ and everything was clicking

[insertsickusername13]

currently squinting at my empty google docs and wondering if i've finally been freed of the richjake curse

[mne-bolno]

//

[viiinz]

rant incoming, see prev post (transphobia tw)

[welcometogrouchland]

MEOWS SO FUCKING LOUD

[ID: a blurry image of a small white kitten with sad eyes meowing into a microphone. End ID]

Me @ you rn

[actuallylorelaigilmore]

so i’ve been fighting off a cold the last few days (mild symptoms, luckily my sore throat only existed the first day) and every time i get sick i forget that migraines can be triggered by illness/infection, yet every time i get sick i have back to back days of migraines. yesterday’s was scary!bad for a minute and i’ve had to go to bed early rather than Do Things the last couple nights. i have a long list of things i want to get done today, starting with the video appt i successfully took care of this morning...so i just need my head to cooperate. 

i’m starting to feel like i have a basic grasp of the crochet techniques i’m working on, which is amazing, i’m deep into the you’re wrong about podcast which has many more episodes for me to hear before i run out (even if the nicole brown simpson murder series is really hard to listen to because it just keeps going and none of it is happy, i can’t wait to be through what feels like their endless coverage of that) and i’m finally rewatching the hsm trilogy. because i’m watching them with @actuallylukedanes, hopefully i’ll actually see the third one this time and get to cross them all off my list. 

i have the music from the wakanda forever trailer permanently stuck in my head and not even rewatching the trailer could get it out of there, so i’m just out here living with the knowledge that my birthday isn’t that far away but it’s simultaneously way too long of a wait. i wish i wanted to see nope because get out was so good (i still haven’t seen us because i’m a horror wimp and even when given the option it just...hasn’t happened) but the whole western/scifi combo has me genre-averse despite everything else it has going for it.

[greatbigstorm]

/ /

[squirmydonnie]

I feel like I tend to have pretty bad ideas

CW: unreality in tags

I don't know that I'm venting. But it's hard for it to not sound that way.

But I'll put warnings because I don't see how else I'd feel okay without putting them there.

It's just more fair that way

[somuchstrdst]

x

[imwritesometimes]

woke up still experiencing the effects of the jardeth chokehold so. you know. will be fuckin useless for the day.

[gender-trash]

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!