Girl who thinks she’s having a normal and innocuous conversation with another woman entirely unaware that to all outside observes she occupies a panel framed with extremely conspicuous amounts of lily flowers
i’m fascinated by the idea you mentioned of applying occult reading techniques to non-occult literature, do you have any good examples of that/can you write one?
Remember how a bunch of people thought the BBC Sherlock show was going to end with gay sex? That’s what happens when you apply esoteric analysis techniques to something not built for it.
It’s a similar analytical toolkit to the people who say shit like “If you add up the values of the letters of JOE BIDEN it equals 666.”
A humorous example would be an article I read about supposed esoteric symbology in My Immortal. The fanfiction. Because the thing is, it actually does kinda have an esoteric reading. It’s based on Harry Potter, which uses a lot of names and terminology from European occultism. It kinda accidentally stumbles it’s way into recreating a bizarro version of the Chymical Wedding. But, it’s clearly not intended to be read that way.
Whereas Alice in Wonderland actually does have several hidden puzzles and codes in it’s text. Carroll damn near has characters say “I fucking love hiding puzzles everywhere.”
That’s the tricky bit. Sometimes it can be tough determine when you’re on the right track, or you’re grasping at straws. This is made even more complicated by the fact that a lot of modern occult authors intentionally add misleading threads, intended to lead the uninitiated in circles.
let’s stop seeing sex as the biggest thing you can do to show someone you love them
everyone knows that the real way to show someone you love them is to find them a really cool rock. not a diamond. just a neat rock that you think they will enjoy
Not a rock THE ARKENSTONE
Why just one rock Why not three Why not the silmarils
If you think that the Disney lawyers who specialize in trademark have not been preparing for this, you may be making an expensive mistake.
I have a graphic design degree but I’m not a copyright artist, so the following is not legal advice, it’s just a set of observations:
Steamboat Willie vs Mickey Mouse
On the left is Steamboat Willie, on the right is Mickey.
Biggest design difference: Mickey has gloves, and Willie doesn’t. Don’t draw Willie with gloves, if you do, you’re drawing Mickey. You can’t see it in this particular screencap, but Willie does have fingers, so you can draw him with full hands.
Willies eye’s are black solid ovals, with no sclera and no eye-shine. Mickey has white sclera, smaller distinct pupils, and usually has eye-shine.
Willie is in black and white. You could theoretically make Willie whatever colors you want but for safety, you should obviously avoid Mickey’s iconic red shorts with white buttons and yellow shoes.
Mickey’s face is usually colored peach these days but it can also be seen in white.
Mickey’s shoes tend to be drawn bigger and rounder than Willie’s.
Willie doesn’t talk, so he doesn’t have the classic Mickey voice, so if you’re doing like, a voice-acted video… just don’t try to imitate Mickey. Give him a different voice.
we, in a manner akin to that of a man who once was, in Rome, an orator of significant skill, who was then for his elegance of speech renowned and now for his elaborate structure of sentences cursed by generations of scholars of Latin, the language which he spoke and we now study, Cicero, write, rather than by any efficiency, functionality, or ease of legibility have our words, our honors, the breaths of our hearts, be besmirched.
Not many jnſtances of Punctuation - but for many Daſhes – et words Capitaliz’d for emphavſis, but not logicaly - ſpeeling and word Endings varied Gratelie - and the long S - ſ - vſed in at the ſtart and Centre of wordes - & the short “s” vſed only at the end - as with the U and V, and the I and J - but v and j only at the ſtart of wordes (we diſtinguishe not between Vouels and Conſonants, only decoratiue Letteres). Ye letter “y” being in lookes cloſe to an Olde letter “þ” which is vſed as “th” - Y may be vſed in the place of TH - but only ſparingly - and ſtill Pronounc’d the ſame as TH. Long and rambling ſentences - ſeeminglie without end - a paragraph can conſiſt of One whole ſentence, and ſhort ſentences are rare – we ſcribe like hiſtorical Modern English – and other european Languages.
it is IMPERATIVE that you listen to weird niche music of some kind. you MUST be a total freak about one artist that no one you meet irl will possibly have heard of
Every once in a while you'll see a donation post on Tumblr and it always is formatted and exactly the same way
It's written to take advantage of our empathy by jamming a bunch of traits that society shuns (always at the top, never less than five of them) and then they ask you to donate to their PayPal
The accounts for these posts are either empty or reblog popular posts from pretty much one or two tags
I've seen like 10 of these
Are people making fake accounts to trick queer people into donating money?
yes, scam fundraiser and donation asks are very much a thing and the main problem with it is that it makes it much harder to share actual genuine mutual aid requests and it’s rly awful. this is like the main reason i only share fundraiser posts from people i personally know or have been mutuals with for a while, it can be rly hard to verify which of the fundraisers i am sent to as a big blog are genuine and which ones arent and it is not a risk i can usually take with such a large audience.
one of the most impressive animals I met this year was a huge platyrhacid millipede, found chugging through some bamboo leaf litter in Malaysia.
he was a pleasant weight to hold in the hand, but spread out over so many gentle, graceful legs. the video offers a nice look at his eyeless face—all polydesmidan millipedes lack eyes.
I only hung onto this animated spinal cord for about thirty seconds before setting him back in the leaves, but I recall this encounter so vividly. a truly memorable creature
if you’re curious how I knew this exquisite gentleman was male, sexing millipedes is pretty easy (especially when they’re hand-sized!)
count to the 8th leg (millipedes have 2 legs per “diplosegment”) & if it’s there, you have a female. males instead have their 8th legs modified into gonopods, hook-shaped sexual organs. yep, millipedes have their genitalia on their “necks”! females lay eggs from there too
worst way to start my new year, thanks. i have a lot of things to say about these companies but i’m tired and just keeping it focused to the pin side of things for this one. do not ever buy pins from these companies, literally ALL of them are stolen from small artists like me. if you want to buy enamel pins, check out etsy, and artist’s personal websites and shops! (though even Etsy has some bootleg pins that ship straight from china, so tread carefully…)
Every pin I’ve designed is, thus far, EXCLUSIVE to my etsy. if you find it anywhere else, it’s been ripped off! and once these stupid bootlegs pop up, it’s basically a never ending game of whack-a-mole trying to get them all taken down…
i don’t know how the other sites work, but Aliexpress in particular is sort of like eBay in that they’re a platform for many individual sellers/stores. even Amazon is notorious for hosting tons of fan merch made from ripped-off designs, so Chinese sites aren’t unique in that regard
even so, i would definitely repeat the sentiment that sites like Aliexpress and Temu are a terrible place to buy fan merch!! for an indie project like Deltarune in particular, we know that there’s only one official merch seller, so it’s easy to cross-reference that: if something you found on a big marketplace doesn’t match any Fangamer merch, they are almost certainly ripping off a fan artist. please take a moment to ensure that the seller is actually the artist (plus you can probably safely assume that fan artists are not going to sell merch on Aliexpress or Amazon lol)
side note: almost all enamel pins are actually manufactured in Chinese factories (manufacturers that claim to be US/UK/Canada-based are actually middleman services) and it’s been suggested that some factories may keep molds/dies from previous clients and reuse them to sell cheaper knockoff pins :( here’s what pintheft.com has to say on the matter:
Although most counterfeits are not produced by the same factory that made the originals, always vet manufacturers before using them. Here are a few things to check:
•Are they selling counterfeits? •Are they using pin artists’ images to advertise? •Does someone you know recommend them? •Are they a middleman or a factory? If middleman, how long have they been working with their supplier? •Are they claiming to be made in the USA?* •Do they have certifications? (Disney, Sedex, etc) •Do they provide inspection reports?
*There are very few pin factories in the US, UK, or Canada. Hard enamel pins are not produced in these countries at all. If the price per pin is under $8, it’s probably not made in the USA.
Now, see, what “Drawn Together” did was just keep Mickey Mouse in shadow, and sometimes when they said his name they bleeped out the “Mickey,” but sometimes when they said his name they bleeped out “Mouse.”
Also before you track down this episode, the entire plot revolves around racist cartoon caricatures and a lot of the jokes age poorly or weren’t great to begin with, a strong atmosphere of “these things aren’t that offensive anymore, we’ve moved on from that!” however the primary thrust of the plot is that Mickey Mouse has been kidnapping and murdering racial stereotype characters so he can deny they existed in the first place; a dig at how Disney deals with its past racism by trying to bury it and pretending it never happened.
Meanwhile you have the Warner Brothers disclaimer:
There are people who hide behind this kind of argument because they really still just wanna laugh at the racist jokes, but yeah I’d say the Disney strategy of basically “who was racist!? Omg who could it be, not us” for years on end was pretty pathetic. (Have they stopped doing that? I don’t pay enough attention to them)
Anyway the point is nothing people do with Public Domain Steamboat Willie is going to be as funny as the Schrodinger’s Plagiarism that is the Original Character Who Is Named Either Mickey **** or **** Mouse. They beat you to it.
I think I’m literally never gonna be sick of this masterpiece. I think watching it on a loop for eight hours could fix me. Dancing’s what clears my soul. Dancing’s what makes me whole.
I just love that this very video is an accumulation of thousands of years worth of art made by people who have never met each other. The concept of this video was so completely unfathomable to every single artist who made the sculptures and yet they’ve all put something toward the creation of it.
Once again, there is absolutely nothing wrong with disliking water and getting hydration in whatever way you can. Put whatever the hell you want in water to make it more palatable. Drink fruit juice, lemonade, gatorade, tea, etc. If you drink coffee primarily, add other non-caffeinated liquids to your diet too.
Sometimes water sucks. It’s fine, you can get plenty of hydration from things other than plain water.
Remember Longcat? I remember Longcat. Fuck the picture on this post, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.
You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.
But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.
Remember when you could summon Longcat in Scribblenauts
And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.
It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it.
Watching the way some men are having a Very Normal Reaction to the term “pavement princess” is hilarious to me. I saw one guy make a tiktok where he showed his truck said “see, I put OFROADER stickers in three places and I went in this gravel road! It’s not a pavement princess!”
Pavement Princess is the name for a jacked up super truck, you know the ones, that really mostly only exist in suburban areas with custom paint jobs and the brightest LEDs you can buy on the market and pickup beds smaller than a Honda Acty. They’re gas guzzling, road destroying, pedestrian killing, ego-boosting machines.
And yes, the Cybertruck is absolutely a Pavement Princess.
Like, damn, maybe we finally do have a slur for cishet white men.
I think a lot of alloros fundamentally misunderstand how being aro actually feels
I don’t go about my day as a hetro person who just happens to opt out of romance when it pops up
I’ve known i was different since before i even knew different was something i could be. Since i was like 12 or 13 I’ve known somehow what i was feeling was off compared to everyone around me. Growing up like that was fundamentally a queer experience for me, even if i wasn’t trans. In fact, i feel like my experiences being aro tie me closer to being queer than even my gender. While i can’t relate to everything in them, other queer coming of age stories do mirror my own aro coming of age. So to say that an aro person, regardless of their other identities, can’t be queer is just baffling to me.
