#brags

[hamletthedane]

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.

[dapper-lil-arts]

Last one I swear... Unless?

[superkitten-poison]

james somerton's cowriter nick is going on discord to defend the channel against plagiarism accusations by saying he doesn't even do any research i'm crying x

OF COURSE I DONT PLAGIARIZE. I DON'T EVEN READ

[termagax]

yknow what pisses me da fuck off. how gay men get to be like teehee im too gay to care about women but lesbians are still expected to center men to the extent that jokes about Characters Who Are Lesbian Icons are always men. "lesbian and her boy blorbo" are the most popular jokes about lesbians on this website. "x man is a he/him lesbian" headcanons outnumber actual content about lesbian characters 10:1 even in series with well-written female characters. but sure youre Too Gay to think about a Yucky Female for ten seconds and you HAVE to broadcast this fact in the notes of posts abt fandom misogyny

[haveihitanerve]

Cold take: Jason Todd smokes cigarettes because he’s the ‘bad boy’ ‘cool sibling’

Hot take: Jason Todd smokes cigarettes because Dick Grayson used to smoke them and even though he’s older now Dick is still his older brother and he’s cool so Jason still smokes them to prove himself to dick.

[chloesimaginationthings]

Happy Father’s Day to everyone but FNAF William Afton..

[mischieviem]

Hello Dean

[egophiliac]

tsum events really are just the best, huh

[dragonpyre]

The real reason Jason Todd hasn’t legally come back to life is cuz he’d be expected to do Wayne Family shit in public, and honestly he’d rather not

[nando161mando]

Hammer & his blood cult are holding “The Trial of Boneface” tonite at 9 p.m. to determine if Boneface is guilty of allegedly lying about fighting in Ukraine & other brags. Wonder if his fake ASOV ID & photoshopped war pics will be used as evidence of his stolen valor.

[irenespring]

Today I would like to shout out that one random Twitter person who made up that JD Vance bragged about fucking a couch.

Imagine making a random shitpost and less than two months later your joke is being used by a major party nominee for Vice President on live television at his introduction rally, earning him thunderous applause.

That poster must be having quite the experience.

[rrogueamendiares]

currently in jjk hell

[dapper-lil-arts]

Rarity brags at family gatherings

[manny-jacinto]

MANNY JACINTO as QIMIR The Acolyte | 1x06 'Teach/Corrupt'

[tarvek-sturmvoraus]

bats: tim are you going to tell us anything you did while searching for bruce tim: not unless everyone gets real cool about a bunch of stuff really quickly

[buckleysibz]

literally no one is beating denny wilson when it comes to careers day at school. oh yeah one of my mom's a firefighter/paramedic. yeah she once performed actual surgery on a call. she was almost a doctor but was like nah. she broke protocol and flew out on a helicopter not once but twice. one time her work partner was a serial killer and she was the one to figure it out.

and then he just casually drops that his other mom is an actual rocket scientist.