ToonTito's Personal Blog & Old Art Archive

my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.

so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"

i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet

so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!

keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.

finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."

i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.

It also has a lot of different kinds of stitches you can do that make different densities of fabric.

I was surprised that I’d never heard of it though. It’s older than knitting and crocheting and even though it’s been done all over the world it’s super relevant to Nordic culture and my grandmother and I are both into keeping in touch with our roots a bit so I’m surprised I’ve never heard of it.

It’s also a lot easier to freehand and adjust as you go than crochet or knitting and you mostly go by inches instead of rows and number of stitches so a large number of accessories like stitch markers or whatever isn’t really necessary.

Puppies (Kushi-zu). Artist: Maruyama Ōkyo (1733-1795). Date: c. 1790. Medium: Ink and color on paper, hanging scroll (kakejiku). Dimensions: 106.5 × 41.5 cm. Collection: Tokyo Fuji Art Museum.

What really set Ōkyo apart from established schools of his time, like Kanō and Tosa, was his method of working from direct observation, a practice he called *shasei*.

The word shasei means drawing or painting from life or nature. Using this technique, Ōkyo became one of the first Japanese painters to work from live models- - namely, real animals and plants. Around 1771, he put together sketchbooks called Shasei Zukan (Scrolls of Sketches from Life).In them, he drew detailed views of a wide variety of living creatures -from insects and birds to small mammals and plants- from multiple angles. These sketchbooks became the foundation for his finished paintings.

Ōkyo’s idea of shasei wasn’t just about optical realism, though. The Smithsonian Institution’s Edo period art research project, which I used as a source for this post, highlights that Ōkyo tried to convey not only what the eye sees, but also what the heart feels. I think we can see that in this piece, too. To me, his affection for the playful puppies is directly reflected in the way his brush spreads the ink.

During the Edo period, when Ōkyo painted these puppies, dogs were much more than just pets in Japanese society. In cities, stray dogs known as machi-inu (neighborhood dogs) were cared for and fed by the whole community, and they’d often play with local children. Dogs were also respected as protective figures in Buddhist and Shinto traditions, since people believed they had the power to ward off evil spirits.

One of the most fascinating examples of this respect was the *Okage Inu* (gratitude dog) tradition. During the Edo period, people believed they needed to make a pilgrimage to the Ise Grand Shrine (Ise Jingū) - Japan’s most sacred site - at least once in their lifetime. But due to old age, illness, poverty, or the strict travel restrictions of the Tokugawa government, not everyone could make the trip. When that happened, some people would send their dogs on the pilgrimage instead. White dogs were especially popular because they were believed to have a spiritual quality. Owners would tie a shimenawa (sacred straw rope) around the dog’s neck, along with small pouches holding money for the shrine priest and an allowance for the dog’s care along the way.

Tsuchigumo Zoshi (Tale of the Earth Spider). Kamakura period, c. 1185-1333. Ink and color on paper. Collection: Tokyo National Museum, Japan.

This illustrated handscroll from Japan’s Kamakura period, titled Tsuchigumo Zoshi, depicts the legendary hunt for a yokai (supernatural creature) by the renowned warrior Minamoto no Yorimitsu and his retainer.

According to the story, Yorimitsu follows a mysterious skull floating in the sky, which leads him to a rundown house on Kyoto’s Kaguraoka hill. Bizarre creatures emerge from the ruins one after another, until finally, a colossal Tsuchigumo – known as the Earth Spider – bursts out of the darkness.

American lawyer Dick Ashworth marches in the Fifth Annual Gay Pride Day parade in New York on June 3, 1974; he became a founding member of Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) and years later his sons Tucker and Eric died of AIDS.

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

Some other topics:

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.