Never Mind Morpheus

Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...

Which leads to a bit of an uproar because omg Shane Hollander has a girlfriend?? who plays hockey???? that's so on brand for him like. okay who was playing last night and got a goal in the first period, we need to find the woman who has Shane Hollander crooning into his phone like a lovestruck teenager. and the consensus lands on an unsuspecting and entirely unrelated CWHL forward who has never even been in the same city as Shane but the Internet is running with the story and there's journalists harassing her and Shane has to get his agent to call her agent so he can apologise for this mess and she's like, dude, I know it's not your fault, but Shane feels so fucking bad about it, you know?

And unfortunately it doesn't really let up as quickly as they thought because it's right before Christmas and isn't this a great story, fucking Hallmark movie shit, so a very unimpressed Leila (her name is Leila) has to look a reporter in the eye after her team just played a really good fucking game of hockey and everybody wants to talk to her about some fucking guy, you know? so she looks him in the eye and says, no, I am not dating Shane Hollander, I have never dated Shane Hollander, I will never date Shane Hollander, I am literally a lesbian. I have a whole-ass girlfriend. She plays for the Blades.

UPDATE:

The other day I was surfing the internet and I found this specialized painting colour wheel, it shows how real paint colours relate to each other. 

Outside: the purest/brightest colours from the tube.

Inside: naturally muted or earthy colors, like browns and ochres.

The Center: dark neutral tones used for mixing shadows.

The Lines: two equilateral triangles. One shows the triad of primary colors, and the other shows the triad of secondary colors. Triads are traditionally used to create vibrant yet perfectly balanced compositions.

Complementary colors: are those located directly opposite each other on the wheel.

Shadows I:

If you want to achieve rich, dark neutrals, the standard rule is to mix a color with its direct complementary (opposite) tone. However, doing this can often make your shadows look flat or muddy.

Instead of using the exact complementary color, the real trick is to use one of the colors right next to it (either to the left or the right). By doing this, you avoid a dull mix and introduce a beautiful, subtle color bias into your shadow, keeping it clean and full of life. You can see an example of this in the second image.

I want to share this with you because I think it is really illustrative!

TUMBLR ADS ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO AUTO-PLAY AUDIO! THAT IS A BUG AND YOU SHOULD REPORT IT!

"This ad is auto-playing audio" is literally on the drop down menu for reporting an ad. Tumblr isn't trying to implement this! Don't protest this "new policy", cause it's not one.

Report the broken ads.

This is all bugs or malicious advertising which is also against tumblers ad policy. You should report all ads which do this.

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

aaaand another one bites the duck,

we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos

power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,

the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis

and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.

Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp

Bird number 14 out of 14,

The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius

thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.

2026 - Make the Republicans hurt for all the ways they're trying to strip people of their votes and put a check on Trump. We can flip the House and maybe even the Senate and actually put some of the checks the Constitution intended back in place. SCOTUS is still fucked and not a lot will get passed over Trump's veto, but we can stop the bleeding.

2028 - Get Trump, Vance, and all the fascists out of the Executive Branch. It's also the only way to start on SCOTUS reform and getting back on the right track. This is also the president who will be overseeing the next census that controls which states get how many Congresspeople.

requested by: @april-rainer

I'm going to take a moment to savor Dracula discourse in my inbox in 2026 when I haven't Dracula posted in years.

Ok, there are a variety of things that I could point out here. First, that "the East" is a relative and imagined category. Romania and Hungary may seem to you to be "the East" but to me as someone who studies this region, they do not. The text also explicitly situates Vienna and Budapest in "civilization" and it is only leaving these imperial metropoles that makes Jonathan feel that he's passing into "The East." I recommend that everyone reads Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe.

Second, the presence of heroic figures in Hungary, like the nuns who take in Jonathan, or the Russian captain of the Demeter. I suspect this is the post you're responding to. Nor does reason or skepticism map cleanly onto East and West. The captain of the Demeter is just as dismissive of the idea of a supernatural threat and skeptical of sailor's superstitions for most of that section. Geographically Russia is as East as Europe gets, but the Russian captain acts so much like the British characters that he can be easily made into an Englishman in adaptations. This should suggest something to us.

Third, I could point to the reading of the text as a stand-in for Anglo-Irish relations using the figure of the explicitly Hungarian (so he suggests in his history monologue) Count oppressing Slovak and Romanian peasants. Using Magyarization as a frame to critique England's treatment of Ireland because they were similar situations was not uncommon at the time.

I have consistently said I think East and West are a false dichotomy because there are things in the text to contradict that. I think the more pertinent categories are Empire and Periphery. Or Metropole and Periphery. I'd argue that the danger isn't coming from "the East", it's coming from a disputed border territory in Transylvania. The story happens where the authority of the imperial government frays and weakens. The story at the end explicitly shows the path back to Transylvania skirting around imperial boundaries, through backwaters where there is less scrutiny and more bribery.

1925 Then and Now