All I know is this, Jesus loves me

but i can't find any evidence of its existence from before 2018 lmao

and searching the artist's name only gets me like 6 pages of results on google

and a little artist showcase page on arthive for this guy with exactly 1 painting listed

and a biography that spells this guy's name like 5 different ways

which i'm pretty sure is because it's machine translated from something

Солнечный город "Sunny City" - No date given.

Мир "World" - No date given.

Чусовские просторы. "Chusovskie expanses." Canvas, oil, 1997. Exhibited at the Nizhny Tagil Museum of Nature.

октябрь "October" 2009 cardboard, oil, 29.5x39.5 cm

Осень на Чусовой, "Autumn on Chusovaya" 1999, canvas, oil, 79x100 cm

Чугун идет "Cast Iron is Coming" 1976

Leroy Brown was about one pound when he was caught in 1973 in Lake Eufala, Alabama, by Tom Mann, who is absolutely legendary in the world of bass fishing. Instead of releasing or taking him home to eat, Mann decided he recognized a spark of something special in the fish, so he took him home and popped him in his backyard pond. Later, he moved the fish to a giant aquarium in his workshop. He was an aggressive fish, so he got named after the song. And Mann loved this fish. He trained him to jump through a hoop, he hand-fed him, he would talk about him to anybody. The fish became internationally known, with publicity in Russia, South Africa, Australia, and other countries.

Then, in 1980, the fish dies- probably of old age. So what to do? Have a funeral. Various sources say between 500 and 1,200 people came (there was a very large bass fishing tournament that weekend), and the local marching band was there to play "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" as the fish's tiny casket was lowered into his grave.

But then things got really wild. On the day of the funeral, it was eventually decided that the ground was too wet and muddy, so Mann put the fish and his casket (actually a satin-lined tackle box full of one dead fish and the lure he was caught with) in the freezer.

That night, somebody stole the dead fish and his tiny casket.

Seriously. This was not a taxidermy fish, this was just. Y'know. A dead fish, with all of the smells that entails.

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

inspired by this image of a panic attack during a CT scan

tron confessional with moss

oh biiiiig agree. lotta parts to this but I'll try to keep my thoughts relatively concise

it's a problem I see in a lot of fandoms -- a tendency to fixate on a protagonist's shortcomings to the point of flat out claiming that they're a horrible person worse than the villains, while at the same time excusing a lot of the antagonist's actions for [insert thinly justifiable motive here]. and I'd love to analyze why this happens. are people just completely unwilling to admit that the "good guys" have critical flaws because they don't want to admit that real people are also flawed? are the actions of an antagonist usually so overtly Evil that it somehow makes them easier to stomach than the oftentimes lesser but more realistic mistakes of a protagonist? or has fandom just lost sight of the fact that characters are vehicles for storytelling and they need to have flaws in order to drive the narrative?

ANYWAY

yeah lol

one of the things that always struck me about Clu, personally, was how vindictive a lot of his actions come across? I always got the sense that his retaliation against the ISOs was personal just as much as it was directive-driven -- in the same way that he clearly wanted to make an Event out of killing Sam in the lightcycle arena. he wants to destroy the things that Flynn cares about, that Flynn loves, the things that distracted him and took his focus away from the Grid. and yes as a system admin it's obviously his job to prioritize the Grid and make it perfect efficient etc. but. the whole franchise is about the fact that programs have thoughts and emotions of their own and can exist outside of their function. so like you said, I think to reduce it to Clu just obeying his written purpose is just that -- reductive. Basics have free will, and I 100% think that what Clu did was a choice.

I actually have a little bit of a work-in-progress theory on why this happens. I think a lot of it comes back to this idea of "you really think the author would do that? just write a character who tells lies?" This idea that unless very explicitly refuted at a later point in the story, (and sometimes not even then), characters' statements and exposition are to be taken at face value, even antagonists'. And the trouble is that often antagonists will put a lot more effort into verbally justifying their actions than protagonists will.

There's a whole grab-bag of possible reasons that I can think of for this quirk; the protagonist's position is assumed to be self-evident so the author doesn't feel as much of a need to flesh it out, the protagonist is more willing to own up to their mistakes rather than try justifying them, the author wants to produce dramatic tension by attacking the protagonist's position and sowing doubt in the audience/a viewpoint character, they just like writing dramatic villain monologues, and so on.

Whatever the case, you see a lot of cases where the antagonist's position is defended by their words, while the protagonist's is defended by their actions and by the overarching narrative and themes. But because the latter two are subtler, if often more pervasive parts of the story, you start seeing some members of the audience coming down with "just write a character who tells lies?" syndrome; the way they see it, the antagonist's points were never directly refuted, so their position is still valid, possibly even moreso than the protagonist's flawed one.

Basically: dowries were an inheritance. It was a way to give a daughter what they would need to live comfortably at the time when they were most likely to need it - leaving their father's care and support and beginning a home elsewhere. In Austen terms we're generally talking about a sum of money, but dowries can also include items for a household like linens and China (goods like this were called a trousseau from at least the 1830s onward). Dowries very materially improved the life of a woman as they were meant to.