Mochi Ice Cream

Like this story could potentially have happened, y’know

( fun fact! many historians say the Filipinos were genderless but there are 7000 islands and many many different indigenous groups with many information missing and destroyed - so working with what we have, we know many groups were not genderless but viewed gender different compared to today. Gender was important to groups like the Tagalog or the Visayan-but not based on “biology”. If you wanted to be a woman then you were seen as a woman and same with wanting to be a man. It was about embodying the energy of your perceived gender and not what genitals you were born with. Not all groups embodied this belief given diversity etc, but we have evidence of many indigenous groups from Luzon and a few from southern islands did not ascribe to gender like we have today until the Spanish set foot on the islands. And many indigenous groups around the world held similar beliefs on Tranness and third genders, many of that history and belief was hurt significantly by colonization!)

A few souces!

(Cw for this ^: this page directly quotes old texts of Spanish missionaries and they do use the term hermaphrodite- be warned. But it’s a great text with great historical sources to back up the discussion on gaps missing given colonial invasion)

get them here!

I haven't seen people talking about this, but the pilot for The Ebony Witch dropped! the visuals are absolutely beautiful. honestly, it has the same magic as old disney (if disney was brave enough to give us a hot elf who's actually 50 cats in a trenchcoat)

You might be aware of Louis Wain. If not by name then by his art. He's the artist behind that series of cat drawings that slowly became more and more abstract and bizarre.

This series of paintings of cats are often labelled as a visual representation of Wain's deteriorating mental illness and schizophrenia. Even more so often labelled as "a tragic display of a painter's failing battle with schizophrenia."

The paintings look like this and were painted around the very early 1900s.

Ok got all that?

So here's the thing.

Although Wain did suffer from a mental illness that was strong enough for him to be institutionalized, his mental illness was never diagnosed with clear certainty. Although "Schizophrenia" is so heavily applied to him based purely on how his series of paintings LOOK, despite actual specialists widely disputing this. On top of this, although he did paint the kaleidoscope cat portraits during this time, it was not the only things he painted, and he was quite capable of painting "normal" pictures of cats.

The Kaleidoscope Cat portraits are more images of him experimenting with colour and shapes, something the Smithsonian themselves state on their website.

Wain had actually made his entire living painting whimsical images of cats, often for product adverts, before he was incarcerated and was actually a very beloved artist at the time. When his friends learned of his incarceration, they started a collection of donation money to help transfer Wain to the Bethlam Royal Hospital instead, one of the best mental health facilities of the time. Even the Prime Minster of the time donated, and they raised a large amount of money across England to help him.

4 years later, Wain drew this as his final image which he released publicly

I knew all about "the Schizophrenic cat Guy" but he had always been presented to me as some tragic case of an artist going mad and his skills and work unraveling as he went insane.