Wild And Precious Life @ravencromwell - Tumblr Blog

So, the brilliant @avelera has been waxing rhapsodic about Arcane for ages. Finally got to watch the pilot yesterday and HOLY SHIT alskdjfjdfjdfs what EVEN so good! My feels, they are many. Watching completely unspoiled, except there are characters named Viktor and Jayce and Maggie ships it.

That opening sequence MY GOD what a visual storytelling masterclass and my god what a relief to have Netflix audio description!

Vi and Powder holding hands, their bond the show's beating heart right from the jump yessssss.

Vander being as deep in the fighting as _anyone and then seeing the kids. Throwing down the gauntlets, soul just _recoiling at the senseless toll of also it all GODDAMN what a gut punch.

Those violins and the children's eerie singing undergirding the prologue. GENIUS.

Vi not! being able to register her mother? sister? friend? 'So, death until Vander sees it, despite standing by the body this whole time. The way someone _else seeing it makes it true, and she finally starts to silent-cry? Fuck.

Vander carrying one girl in each arm!!!!

It is so! hard to sell charisma, but damn does Vi have it in spades with the job.

Coaxing Powder to jump _absolutely, but even more when she keeps her head and gets them out, while the boys and Powder are panicking.

"Wanna see how that turns out?" after Decker has absolutely beaten the living shit out of her, but that easy deadpan delivery of Steinfeld's? Doesn't matter _he's the one holding the knife you've got no doubt she will kick his ass* swoons* GODDAMN exquisite character work.

Especially because it's a PERFECT mirror of Vander's tone when breaking up the bar fight someone's a daddy's girl, aren't they?

VANDER!!!! Defusing a bar fight with words, a smile, and his sheer fucking REP fuck I'm here for this shit. I'm weak for genuine kindness warring with ruthless determination to keep their little slice of world safe.

The whole speech to Vi hit like a ton of bricks cause he's dead on. "Whatever happens, it's on you" what a line.

So much talent, but she's so, so young and wild.

"This look on my face. That will always mean you need to shut up." God, Steinfeld has the best lines! and delivery.

Powder not hearing the rest of what she says oh, that's not ominous at _all! even with their later scene. And ahhhhh what a scene! You can see Vi looking at her "What Would Vander Do?" bracelet so hard.

One second, you're cackling over Milo falling ass-first into paint, and then Vi's toy story the ACTUAL FUCK show? Their pacing is sublime.

Well, that ending scene wasn't terrifying why do you ask? Only a mouse becoming a super-killing machine. The little confused, terrified kitty meow when hunter became hunted and the world was suddenly very not NORMAL showrunners you are VERY lucky you waited till the show's conclusion when I'm invested in these characters I do not like kitty murder.

Ok, random gang-lord "Vander's in trouble" I guess Christmas and your birthday just came early; your vindictive ex vibes are _strong my dude.

Well, shit, never expected to feel sorry for you, Decker but think maybe I do?

The show's whole aesthetic is just GENIUS. Some blend of scifi and fantasy, with that real steampunk flare. The elevator into the Undercity. The gems, which I have no! idea what's going on with but yeah, very very intrigued. The animals that aren't quite animals of our world, ala the thing in the crate the homeless city dweller was sitting on. That whole web of live and let live alliances, between Vander and Grayson, Vander and the rest of the undercity. The luxury and squalor contrasts DAMN, the world-building is EXCELLENT.

#@Arcane #Wow just _wow.#Arcane

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notbecauseofvictories

Metropolis Ensemble, Erik Hall & Sandbox Percussion || Full album on Bandcamp

#GODDAMN! GODDAMN this is so good #eerie and gorgeous and so very unique!#music

raskolnikv

“In King Lear (III:vii) there is a man who is such a minor character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely “First Servant.” All the characters around him – Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund – have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the story is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such delusions. He has no notion of how the play is going to go. But he understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it. His sword is out and pointed at his master’s breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his whole part: eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted.”

— – C.S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night” (via sandovers)

#still some of the best!#Shakespeare #meta #humans being awesome

hope-for-the-planet

These pescatarian birds are directly exposed to PFAS contamination due to the island's position near the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

While continued vigilance a regulation is needed, this data indicates that regulations are working to reduce PFAS concentrations in marine ecosystems.

sattarehi

Yes!!!! I did a review of literature on PFASs in human drinking water about half a year ago, and there is a lot of really good progress! Please celebrate this, please don't let this solution be forgotten (at least so quickly) as the ozone layer or acid rain.

We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!

Environmental problems CAN BE SOLVED.

#AHHHHH this is excellent!#Environmental stuff

In 1832, English actress Fanny Kemble came on a sort of American grand tour with her father. Kemble later married an American, unaware he'd made his fortune in slaves. When he had the chutzpah to tell her "oh, don't worry your pretty little head about the slaves and their nonsense," she promptly divorced him—weathering some horrendous child custody disputes in the bargain and became a fierce antislavery advocate. Went back to her acting career, too And became a sorta traveling Shakespeare professor!

Travel writing was one of the most "respectable" genres open to women, and Kemble kept a diary of her grand tour (and later the horrors of plantation life which bomb she dropped on the Confederacy's head smack dab in the Civil War because she was a badass). But before all that came her journal of the grand tour:

Oh, these coaches! English eye hath not seen, English ear hath not heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of Englishmen to conceive the surpassing clumsiness and wretchedness of these leathern inconveniences. They are shaped something like boats, the sides being merely leathern pieces, removable at pleasure, but which in bad weather are buttoned down to protect the inmates from the wet. There are three seats in this machine, the middle one having a movable leathern strap, by way of a dossier, runs between the carriage doors, and lifts away, to permit the egress and ingress of the occupants of the other seats'''. For the first few minutes, I thought I must have fainted from the intolerable sensation of smothering which I experienced. However, the leathers having been removed, and a little more air obtained, I took heart of grace, and resigned myself to my fate. Away wallopped the four horses, trotting with their front, and galloping with their hind legs: and away went we after them, bumping, thumping, jumping, jolting, shaking, tossing and tumbling, over the wickedest road, I do think, the cruellest, hardheartedest road that ever wheel rumbled upon. Through bog and marsh and ruts, wider and deeper than any Christian ruts I ever saw, with the roots of trees protruding across our path, their boughs every now and then giving us an affectionate scratch through the windows; and, more than once, a halfdemolished trunk or stump lying in the middle of the road lifting us up, and letting us down again, with most awful variations of our poor coach body from its natural position. Bones of me! what a road! Even my father's solid proportions could not keep their level, but were jerked up to the roof and down again every three minutes. Our companions seemed nothing dismayed by these wondrous performances of a coach and four, but laughed and talked incessantly, the young ladies, at the very top of their voices, and with the national nasal twang

I love her wit and verve, her terribly! offended English sensibility as all the Americans are just [shrug emoji] around her. I've become utterly enamored with her writing while taking this summer course; our history is littered with such fierce, talented women writers we've nearly forgotten. Fortunately, Kemble has several! publications we can get our hands on courtesy of the joy and glory of Internet Archive!

#Fanny Kemble #History #Ladies Being Magnificent #lit geekery #book babbling

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All right, tumblr. There have to be some Magician's Daughter fans out there! I need people to squee about the brilliant Morgaine characterization with—you want deeply! flawed morally gray female characters on a redemption arc that in large part revolves around her profound fondness for a young woman in whom she sees a great deal of herself? This is your lady folks. And the fucking villains!!!! Every single one of them had compelling moments, sympathetic moments, without ever losing sight of the fact they were just EVIL. Not in some grand, moustache-twirling way, but the banal pettiness of the rich who cannot let go of power, or of men so twisted by compromise and practicality they poison everything even while loudly declaring themselves the "sensible" adults saving the world. I need to talk about marvelous adoptive father-daughter relationships, and ptsaid. And how _marvelously platonic! this book was! I mean yes shipping Rowan/Morgaine so hard haven't shipped hets like this in ages! But so many! of the central relationships: Biddy and Morgaine, Hutch and Biddy, Hutch and Rowan, Biddy and Powan, Biddy and Anna. There is tremendous platonic love driving this plot and especially in this month where we so often forget queerplatonic and ase-spectrum visibility goddamn I'm here for it.

#I've been reading this book in stolen fragments of spring and summer semester and just MY GOD!#MY GOD!!!!#it's luminous. Alix Harrow described it as having such profound nostalgia and freshness. and that's the perfect blurb!#I felt like I was falling back into the best of my childhood. Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword or Hero And the Crown #but with its own fresh ideas and complicated morality. This is a Camusian book in the best sense #all hope and kindness without being Pollyanna. I love it to pieces #officially an #H.G. Peary #fan now #book babbling #lit geekery #The Magician's Daughter

purplebass

today is my birthday!! here's some bday headcanons for the adsom characters <3

kell has a complex relationship with his birthday. he doesn't know the exact date bc his memories had been wiped when he was bought into the maresh family. rhy decided they would celebrate it the day they officially became brothers

he also doesn't enjoy attention but rhy never forgot to bring him a pastry or a small cake in his favorite flavor so they could eat it together. rhy would obviously try to make kell laugh while doing this and once kell was about to choke with cake. he would also give kell gifts he picked for him

after kell goes on the grey barron with lila, she makes him work even harder on that day, since he made a point that it is a day just like any other. if they are docked somewhere, she takes him out to drink. one time, she secretly docked in red london to surprise him so he could see rhy and meet ren for the first time

needless to say, lila tries to keep her birthday a secret. even alucard had to pry it from her hands, and her crew casually discovered it and prepared a big dinner for her aboard. she never truly celebrated it nor thinks is important, although she is grateful to be alive and to be on that ship with kell and everyone, who are now her family. kell made a point to tell her happy bday first thing in the morning and let her choose one thing she wants to do with him that day (it's often training of some kind, which often ends with kissing)

rhy loooooves his birthday and celebrates it twice. the first party is official, and all royalty is invited. he hates most of them, but he wants to make his enemies annoyed: he wants them to see he's thriving and wearing the best outfit and smile

the second party is private and held in his private chambers. there's his favorite people (kell and lila can't come every year, unfortunately, but they once celebrated via the basin) and they play games. to him, the best gift is that people he loves are present

holland never celebrated his birthday and discovered birthdays by travelling to the other londons. he finds the concept a bit silly. not that one can't celebrate how many years they've been alive, but growing in white london, the most important thing was staying alive and seeing another day. there wasn't time to celebrate life, when you had to survive.

if holland lived, maybe kell would've brought him a cupcake to celebrate every year. and if holland in tftop is real, kosika would organize a party to celebrate him

alucard used to spend his birthday with his sister anisa, who never forgot to make a handmade gift for him. after becoming captain, he celebrated on his ship and give the day off to his crew. the night ended with everyone or almost, very drunk and flirty

after moving to the soner rast, alucard decided to celebrate his bday with his closest family only. for him it's enough they relax, eat good food. he just wants to enjoy his company. most of the time, they like to hang around in the gardens, and pretend to go on a pic nic

#adsom #shades of magic #ahhhhhh these made me smile a great deal this morning!

millenniallust4death

I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

millenniallust4death

Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️

psycorax

Reblog to have your dashboard be visited by the spirit of joy that death can end but not erase.

leavescrown

Love that this is well beyond 7000 people now and still going

millenniallust4death

@leavescrown Exactly! It’s a beautiful gift. Martin and Bosco out there travelling around the Tumblr community, continually making new friends.

millenniallust4death

@sseanettles

#hello again martin and bosco!! sending you boys round for another go :)

Reading your tag made me laugh out loud. It’s like two old friends unexpectedly stopped by your porch for a quick visit. XD

petermorwood

I’ll always reblog Martin and Bosco when they splash across my dash, because of Reasons.

What’s loved, lives.

ravencromwell

Go ahead, put anything.

#ohhhhhh! this is beautiful #tumblr gold

a-totally-reasonable-username

I'm wishing a very Happy Pride Month to all the queer people who:

are disabled

are chronically ill

can't celebrate for health reasons

disability gets in the way of their gender representation

disability got in the way of a relationship

don't have anyone to celebrate with

have homophobic caretakers

Happy Pride Month to all disabled queer people

#so so so much this #queer stuff

Old Elias Hicks had a farm on Long Island. When a young man he had traveled as an itinerant Quaker evangelist between Vermont and the Chesapeake, preaching the Inner Light, "that lighteth every man that cometh into the world" (John 1:9(…A decade after his death they would still tell the story of how, in Virginia, he courageously called upon a planter who had threatened to shoot him for preaching against the sin of slavery, and after repeated visits persuaded the man to set his people free…Throughout his life Hicks rigorously defended the right as he saw it: the austere Quaker tradition of refusing to compromise with worldliness. He insisted that principled persons should avoid consuming the products of slave labor, such as sugar, rice, or cotton textiles. Besides slavery, he denounced banks, politics, and the Erie Canal. ("If the Lord had intended there should be internal waterways, he would have placed them there.") As for scientific learning, he considered it as "trivial" as "ribbons on a young woman's head."…In the 1820's, he became the focal point of a controversy that irreparably split the American Society of Friends. Ever since the seventeenth century, the Society of Friends (nicknamed "quakers" for their occasional emotional trances) had conceived themselves as a people apart. Within Protestantism, they were super-Protestants. Where Protestants demystified and simplified the Eucharist, [communion] Quakers did not observe it at all, nor did they practice baptism. Their silent meetings had no order of service. They wrote no systematic theology. Since both women and men possessed the divine Spirit, the Inner Light, they practiced a substantial degree of gender equality. They did not ordain clergy, though they "recorded" the fact that God's Spirit particularly spoke through designated individuals. They dressed plainly and spoke plainly, using "thee" and "thou," the familiar form of address, instead of "you," considered more polite. They refused to serve in the armed forces. They refused to take oaths in court, on the grounds that one should tell the truth all the time, not just in special circumstances. But the international evangelical movement affected them in ways that two hundred years of persecution had never done…They started associating with non-Quakers in philanthropic organizations. Sometimes they seemed more interested in cooperating with other white evangelicals than in bearing uncompromising witness against slavery…Elias Hicks stood out against these trends. He also criticized those Quakers, chiefly in Philadelphia, who had adapted sufficiently to the ways of the world to become successful merchants and entrepreneurs…In April 1827, dissension wracked the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (analogous to a synod in Presbyterianism). The followers of Hicks walked out and set up their own Philadelphia Yearly Meeting. Other yearly meetings had to decide which of the two Philadelphia meetings to recognize, and in doing so they precipitated a schism throughout American Quakers…[along with] temperance, prison reform, and public support for elementary schools…the Hicksites displayed a willingness to pursue causes that others thought quixotic. Hicksite Quakers provided a disproportionately large number of recruits to the immediate, uncompensated abolition of slavery. And when at last a movement endorsing equal rights for women surfaced, the little minority of Hicksite Quakers would make themselves conspicuous in its support. —Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought, pp. 195-197 [insertions in brackets mine, to make text more coherent after shaving ancillary explanation cause lord Howe can maunder]

God, it's stories like this that make me love history! It's tempting to write Hicks off as a total _crank! But his story forces us to confront how complex, often contradictory the ideology most people hold is in practice. How they can be entirely! wrong-headed on issue A and still do immeasurable good on issue q over here. And learn the cognitive dissonance of holding what they've done worth applauding alongside that with which we disagree.

#Elias Hicks #Daniel Walker Howe #History #much of Howe's narrative is taken up with antislavery religious reformers. and look. some of them had some _real suss views by modern #standards. especially when you get into the “free soilers” who yes wanted abolition but in large part so blacks would all self-deport to #Africa and stop competing with white Immigrant labor--(which. to be clear was not! Hicks' ideology! I bring those abolitionists up in #conjunction with him because the taking his life into his hnds balls is very emblematic of many members of the reform movement #right along with the objectively terrible bits came some real zero fucks to give grit and toughness man #lit geekery #book babbling #Quakers

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Those who signed a temperance pledge were encouraged to put a T after their names if willing to take the extra step [the usual stance was simply moeration] of pledging total abstinence; from this derives our word "teetotaler." —Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought

#fascinating! bit of #linguistics #this is a really excellent #history #of #1812-1850. I've admittedly got my quibbles: dude you're letting John fucking Calhoun off wayyyyy too easy. and James Madison and Monroe in a #couple spots too! but DAMN mostly this is really magnificent. very blunt on the horrors of slavery and Indian removal #very good at contextualizing much of this period in the communication and transportation revolutions of telegraph and railroad. generally #puncturing simplistic myths—no. for example. temperance was not simply a mechanism of control imposed by elites but a response to genuinely #HORRIFIC booze consumption—almost SEVEN gallons a year per person (for comparison it's currently about _two)#so I rec it for a lotta reasons. but I thought the language geeks of tumblr would especially appreciate this gem!#book babbling #lit geekery

sexchangedotcom

ancient roman women whose husband keeps looking at the neighbour's boy quintus and he never looks at her that way and she can't even chainsmoke in the kitchen because they don't have marlboro blues in ancient times. and she can't even go to the club because they haven't discovered drum and bass music yet. her friend clodia's having visions of a woman named doechii but neither of them knows what that means

ravencromwell

This post was great, and then @notbecauseofvictories tags made it marvelous!

I know everyone and their mother has seen this already but I think it's very funny. #....that said the idea that they haven't discovered drum music by the common era is just flatly incorrect. #even bass! if you're specifically talking about the electronic bass sure. #but like. they had the cithara! nero could have been doing cool riffs on the hydraulis! #a respectably married woman and her friend might not have been permitted to dance like crotalistriae #but come on. they would have gone to street festivals. they could have danced in her cubicula. there are opportunities.

#history #Ancient Rome #humans being awesome #tumblr gold #everything “new” was old in a different form: people have always loved and laughed and danced man

s-n-arly

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

s-n-arly

Additions

Updated September 22, 2023

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to expanding other people’s knowledge on this topic. Information literacy is a huge topic in high schools and universities, and one of the things teachers and librarians are struggling to help students understand is the fact that their search engine is not free of bias and may prioritize ads (or what it thinks you want to see based on your shopping experience) rather than actual information. It’s made more difficult by the fact that the technology in use is constantly evolving.

Also, big thanks to the folks who reminded me to fix the ref links in the original post. Not sure what I was thinking when I copied it over from FB, but it’s now fixed (can’t vouch for reblogs, this is Tumblr afterall).

Someone accurately noted that the bulk of the above links are databases, not search engines. The initial post called them research sites not search engines. If you want something better than Google, I would usually suggest using Duck Duck Go. Someone in the comments said it skews right, but I have not seen research or evidence to back that up, so proceed as you wish. I would recommend Firefox as a browser, and you could consider one of these search engines.

https://www.qwant.com/ - Search engine with no tracking or advertising

https://www.ecosia.org/ - Search engine that plants trees – has ads and that ad revenue runs the engine while funding tree planting

Additional Sites Recommended in the Comments

Here are some of the top sites recommended in the comments.

Academic/Reseach

Academia - platform that shares academic research

arXiv - (pronounced archive, apparently) is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for 2,328,899 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. It is housed by Cornell University

Astrophysics Data System - The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a digital library portal for researchers in astronomy and physics, operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) under a NASA grant. The ADS maintains three bibliographic collections containing more than 15 million records covering publications in astronomy and astrophysics, physics, and general science.

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine - BASE is a search engine specifically for academic studies texts, and contains more than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.

Bioline - This is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

Education Resources Information Center - ERIC is a comprehensive, easy-to-use, searchable, internet-based bibliographic and full-text database of education research and information.

JSTOR - academic digital library providing access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images and primary sources in 75 disciplines.

PubMed - the National Institute for Health’s National Library of Medicine, comprises more than 35 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites.

Research Gate - founded to address the problems in the way science is created and shared. Connects the world of science and makes research open to all.

Research Papers in Economics - Volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science for RePEc.

Sci-Hub - research publication library – technically pirated content, but please note that the researchers do not get paid for publication, and will often send you a PDF of their research for free if you ask, it’s the publications that want to restrict access to paying readers

US Government Science Portal - Science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

World Cat - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where the rare book you need is.

Libraries

Boston Library History & Political Science - The Boston Library has a ton of history and poli sci resources. Big libraries often have things available digitally for free, even if you aren’t in the area.

Hathi Trust Digital Library – This library provides free digitized books from all over the world.

Internet Archive - This non-profit library houses millions of free digital books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

PDF Drive - This is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format, claiming over 225 million names. Caution advised as some users report malware may be hidden in with the valid content.

Project Gutenberg - This site provides free downloads of digital books, focusing on works with expired US copyright. Note, if you look for out-of-print books on Google, it will try to sell you books that you can actually download free from Gutenberg (I’ve tested this multiple times).

Z Library – This digital library provides ebooks for free. Currently considered a security risk by Firefox, so maybe avoid.

_

Please visit my Resources for Writers page for other subject areas.

#some _absolute _gems on here! Internet Archive. Hathi. Jstor. invaluable just invaluable #for both academic and fannish purposes #reference #future reference #writing reference #technology

ibeching

“In Lieu Of Keen Virtue” (2017) by British-Ghanaian artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

New Yorker profile of the artist.

vicshush

[ID: A painting of a Black man in a high-collared dark orange sweater and black pants against a shadowed tan background. He is looking to his left with heavy-lidded eyes and is leaning back in an armless chair, one leg up and bent, his wrists loosely crossed in his lap. The man has short hair, a close mustache and beard. Light coming from his left brings out the definition of his face, shadows gathering on his right temple, cheek, and jaw. A black cat is draped over his left shoulder, paws bracing on his shoulder/arm and tail upright. /end ID]

ravencromwell

I've been utterly obsessed with this art for nearly a month--something about the whimsy of kitty on shoulder contrasted with careworn exhaustion in the shadows across this man's face just mesmerized me. And MaSSIVE hat-tips to op for the gorgeous image description--every one of those who make art accessible on this website needs to be fucking canonized.

Anyway, I went looking for the full profile, which is a glorious piece of art in its own right--link to a nonpaywalled version--. Here are some of my favorite excerpts, for anyone as enthralled by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye as I was:

The show has a melancholy, literary title, "Under-Song For A Cipher," and consists of seventeen paintings hung low, depicting a set of striking individuals, all slightly larger than human scale, though not imposingly so. Most are on herringbone linen; one is on canvas. It's impossible to avoid noticing that they are all—every man and each woman—physically beautiful. Mostly they are alone. They sit, stretch, lounge, stand, and are often lost in contemplation, their eyes averted. If they are with others, the company is never mixed, as if too much heat might be generated by introducing that half-naked man over there to this sharp-eyed dancing girl. In the oeuvre of the British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, there are quite a few dancers, lithe in their leotards, but all of her people look as though they might well belong to that profession. They are uniformly elegant. One young man puts his hands on his knees and laughs, with his legs apart and his feet turned out; he is dressed simply, like the rest, in blocks of swiftly laid paint, creating here a black vest, there some white trousers. No shoes. The artist dislikes attaching her figures to a particular historical moment, and there's no way around the historicity of shoes. Sometimes the men hold animals like familiars—an owl, a songbird, a cat. The colors are generally muted: greens and grays and blacks and an extraordinary variety of browns. Amid this sober coloration splashes of yellow and pink abound, and vivid blues and emerald greens, all tempered by the many snowdrop gaps of unpainted canvas, like floral accents in an English garden. The surrounding walls are painted a dark heritage red, bringing to mind national galleries and private libraries, but also, for this viewer, the books you might find in such places, specifically the calico covers of nineteenth-century novels. This red has the effect of bringing a diverse selection of souls together, framing and containing them, much like a novel contains its people, which is to say, only partially. For Yiadom-Boakye's people push themselves forward, into the imagination—as literary characters do—surely, in part, because these are not really portraits. They have no models, no sitters. They are character studies of people who don't exist. … Nor will the titles of these paintings identify them. A dancing girl in the midst of an arabesque bears the caption "Light Of The Lit Wick." A gentleman in an orange turtleneck with a cat on his shoulder: "In Lieu Of Keen Virtue." That antic fellow with his hands on his knees: "A Cage For The Love." We have become used to titles that ironize or undercut what we are looking at, providing conceptual scaffolding for feeble visual ideas, or weak punch lines to duller jokes. For Yiadom-Boakye, titles are allusive; they should be considered, she has said, simply "an extra mark in the paintings." For an artist, she is unusual in describing herself as a writer as much as a painter—her short stories and prosy poems frequently appear in her catalogues. In a recent interview in Time Out, she reflected on the relation between these twin roles. "I don't paint about the writing or write about the painting," she said. "It's just the opposite, in fact: I write about the things I can't paint and paint the things I can't write about." Her titles run parallel to the images, and—like the human figures they have chosen not to describe or explain—radiate an uncanny self-containment and serenity. The canvas is the text.

#God I JUST. this is so gorgeous #ladies being magnificent #humans being awesome #furry darlings #poetry #Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

badassbutterfly1987

(ID: Pic 1: "You died screaming, yet the monster who took your place was silent. -- you are a weapon, and weapons do not weep."

Pic 2: A photosurrealist oil painting of a man clawing at his obscured face. The fingers sink into his skin, raising it up like messy clay.

Pic 3: An eye filled with inky blackness, no iris or white visible. End ID.)

Pic 2: Cascade by Henrik Aarrestad Uldalen

Pic 3: Pinterest

Shades of Magic: Holland

day 20: living weapon

#HOLY FUCKING HELL this is eerie and gorgeous. the skin coming up in those awful messy streaks. so eerily #reminiscent of Holland's AGOS comment he'd tried more than once to cut out the Soul Seal. And OHHHHH that _quote #just _hauntingly apt #adsom #shades of magic #Holland Vosijk

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svgarbellss

some random adsom inconsistencies and retcons i never see talked about !

1. As Enose vs. As Tascen

In the first book, Kell uses the blood command As Enose (to find), in order to travel to the location of a specific person. This spell is never used again after ADSOM. Instead, they start using As Tascen (to transfer) for the same purpose for the remainder of the series.

2. Onase Aven vs. Aven Essen

Tieren introduces himself to Lila as the onase aven (the head priest) during ADSOM. This title/term is literally never seen or used again. Friendship ended with the onase aven 😤 the aven essen is my new best friend ig

(I wrote about this on the adsom tv tropes page btw under early installment weirdness, if the words seems familiar. dw they are mine haha, i wrote basically half the entries for adsom on that site lmao, you should check it out if you’ve never read it!)

Shades of Magic is a fantasy trilogy by V. E. Schwab. The first book was released on February 24, 2015. A sequel trilogy called Threads of P

ravencromwell

While most of these def fall under "continuity, not always V.E.'s strong suit" I think As Enose may be a little different.

In Chapter I of "Fire and Festival" Kell notes "there were stories, of non-Antari who tried to open doors and got stuck"

It is true he also says travel by token won't work if she's been trapped between the worlds.

But! We see at several earlier points Kell's actually a very excellent spell inventor—the healing salve, the guards' swords, spelled for short-term severance of targets' magic. He also sees magic closer to friend than thing to dominate, as typified by his and Holland's dispute later. Earlier, when he can't travel courtesy of encountering the wrong side of said bespelled swords, he coaxes, and magic complies.

All the other times we've see characters using As Tascen, they know the other people are somewhere--it may be in a different world, but it's at least a tangible, corporeal place. Using something different from As Tascen, I've always thought, was an implicit ask: Try! to find her, even if that means taking me _between the doors into the sort of place which shouldn't exist even for Antari. Because for all he says it was Lila's choice to come, he doesn't want her to come to any harm--he was as blown away by her coming back and knocking Holland out for him as she was him coming to Holland's trap, after all.

#Kell Maresh #Lila Bard #Shades of Magic #Headcanons #Adsom

badassbutterfly1987

Okay I’m a little sleep-deprived but if I must suffer these thoughts so should you:

cw: vague discussion of non-con sex acts

So while it isn’t stated in canon, it isn’t hard to surmise that the Danes would sexually abuse Holland. They have complete power over him, don’t regard him as a real person (not that they treat average people well either), and are both sadistic in general, especially Athos.

My current thought is what that extends to (for fic purposes) while feeling in character.

Did Athos share him with Astrid as a disturbing twin bonding activity or did she have to wait for her own Antari pet? Did Athos ever involve other people (mind controlled or otherwise)? Could he let Holland top to give him the illusion of control or would that feel too vulnerable (insert something about toxic masculinity)? How/would any of these elements be affected if one or both were trans?

ravencromwell

rubs hands together gleefully

Oooo thank you for the three A.M. excuse to compare bleak smut headcanons on main! Putting the rest of this beneath a readmore, for anyone who'd rather skip my fucked-up noncon musings.

#like Butterfly would love! to hear other folks' takes on any/all of this #shades of magic #Athos Dane #Holland Vosijk #Athos Dane/Holland Vosijk #for “both are trans” I got nothing because “What Butterfly did” is pretty much the gold standard there currently imho #but hopefully you'll find some of these others interesting :)

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