Beef Me Up, Scotty!

Because a duck coming to you with onions tied to its back is like a soup ready to be made delivering itself to you! What luck! A duck comes bearing onions!

That proverb is also where Farfetch'd comes from.

"They tortured Greta very severely before our eyes. [...] They dragged little Greta by her hair before our eyes, beat her, and forced her to kiss the Israeli flag. They did everything imaginable to her, as a warning to others" - Journalist Ersin Celik

"Greta Thunberg, a brave woman, is only 22 years old. She was humiliated and wrapped in an Israeli flag and exhibited like a trophy." -Journalist Lorenzo Agostino

"It was a disaster. They treated us like animals." - Singer-songwriter and humanitarian activist, Hazwani Helmi

"We stayed with reverse handcuffs for 5 hours. When we went to prison, they didn't give us water, we had to drink water from the toilet." - Author Said Ercan

"When we showed our reaction, they increased their violence even more. They tried to keep us under constant pressure in prison, waking us throughout the night and changing our locations." - Doctor Osman Cetinkaya

The quoted statements above are what we know from individual activists from the Global Sumud Flotilla.

The words of Aycin Kantoglu are important: "We actually experienced a little bit of what Palestinians go through."

She is correct. They were denied clean water and medicine, kept awake, moved from place to place, starved, dehumanized, and had their bodies used to generate Israeli propaganda. They endured this terror for days. This is terrible. And this is only a glimpse of the terror that Palestinians have endured.

My friend Fadel (@fadel-danii) and his family have been denied access to clean water and starved for months. They have been forcibly displaced over and over again. They are kept awake with the sound of bombings and the insects and animals that get inside their damaged tent. He has struggled for two years to afford his medications.

They cannot simply return home at the end of this suffering and be treated for their injuries, because their house was destroyed, their healthcare infrastructure and doctors are constantly under attack, their land is being killed, their water polluted, and there is no clear end in sight.

Fadel started this fundraising campaign to afford travel to a hospital that could perform surgery to remove shrapnel that pierced his body during the bombing of his family's home. His campaign was verified and shared by @90-ghost and @a-shade-of-blue, and was vetted by @gazavetters (#197 on the gazavetters spreadsheet). That was early summer of 2024. It has been over a year since then, and he has still not raised these funds.

As we all know, women are responsible for original sin, as a result of which mankind was cast from the Garden of Eden and women were cursed with painful childbirth. In addition women have periods, which are the sign of original sin.

Problem: The Virgin Mary was perfect. Can’t have been cursed with original sin. No periods.

Question: Where does the blood go?

For all our wonderful theories about spontaneous generation and phlogiston, we do believe in some form of conservation of matter. If women have all this extra blood all the time, you can’t just have one wandering around with it building up inside her. It’s gotta go somewhere!

Well, we figured it out in the end. You see, as we all know not least from reading the above post, milk is just boiled blood. So for Mary, the blood just sort of condensed and she was in a state of perpetual lactation.

This led to things like a particular saint (it’s Bernard) having a vision of the Madonna appearing before him and squirting her breast milk into his mouth, to apply either wisdom or a cure for an eye infection, which has delightfully been depicted in several works of art.

- Total lack of atmospheric perspective (things don't fade into the distance)

- Very realistic shading but no or only very faint shadows cast by ambient light.

- Limited interaction between objects and environment (shadows, ripples etc)

- Flat textures and consistent lighting used for backgrounds that would usually show a lot of variation in lighting, colour and texture

- Bodies apparently modelled piece by piece rather than drawn from life, and in a very stiff way so that the bodies show the pose but don't communicate the body language that would usually go with it. They look like dolls.

- Odd composition that cuts off parts that would usually be considered important (like the person's head in the snowy driving scene)

- Very precise drawing of structures and perspective combined with all the simplistic elements I've already listed. In other words, details in the "wrong" places.

What's fascinating about this is that in early or bad CGI, these things come from the fact that the machine is modelling very precisely the shapes and perspectives and colours, but missing out on some parts that are difficult to render (shadows, atmospheric perspective) and being completely unable to pose bodies in such a way as to convey emotion or body language.

my impression is that colville did see the world as an unsettling place and a lot of his work was fueled by this general ~malaise?? but in a lot of cases, he was trying to express particular fears or traumas. for instance, this painting (horse and train) was apparently inspired by a really tragic experience his wife had: