Way too funny not to share

For those who need to hear this.

Changed his mind

(via)

me: I have ideas I should finish also me: catfred

My humble improvement

You ever have a compliment that just sticks with you for literal years and years? Maybe forever?

For me, it’s when I was working as a figure model for art classes at my university (because it paid well due to being an early-morning thing and was easy to get because nobody else wanted to apply due to the near-nakedness and pervasive body image issues in our culture). There was this one professor who was always so happy when I showed up as the female model for that day because he said that I had a “good sense of motion”, and it was fun to draw. (Which, in itself, was a great compliment because I am a clumsy, self conscious person.)

But what really got me was one day we were doing 15-minute poses, which are harder to do because you need to come up with something interesting and dynamic, but you have to be able to hold it for a quarter of an hour without moving even a little bit. They didn’t have any specific guidance for us, so I just… did something. Idk. But about five minutes into wandering around helping the students and talking to them, he paused and told me that I was doing a good job, and, “What a fun pose. You’re reminding me of Rodin’s ‘Eve,’ there. You always have a very Rodin sort of energy about you. Thanks for waking up early for us.” And then just went back to discussing the use of ink with one of the students like he hadn’t almost reduced me to tears.

Then I went home and looked up Rodin’s ‘Eve’ and was blown away because she actually did look like me? I had ended up in that pose almost exactly just by chance, but she also had a soft, squidgy tummy and the hip dips and weird butt and big feet and thunder thighs and strong calves, just like me.

And I don’t have a great relationship with my body. Very much the opposite. I frequently hate the way I look and fit into it, but then occasionally from the depths of the past comes the voice of an art nerd telling me I’m like a Rodin sculpture, and I feel like, “Yeah, I have Rodin Energy so suck it, brain!” And it helps me reframe the way I’m thinking about myself because I can get outside of my head for a minute and see that while I’m frustrated with my body, it has an art to it just by existing. Soft tummy? Fun to draw, nice curves! Big thighs? Strong lines! Dimples and wrinkles and slopes become a place for light to sit. Bodies are so cool, and that includes mine! Even if it’s not quite what I want it to be, it’s still a work of art that nature sculpted just for me.

And for him it just seemed like such an off-handed, normal, natural thing to say. He thought “Hey, that looks like Rodin,” and so he said it.

Just… Idk. Compliment people. Say what’s on your mind. You have no idea whether it’s going to totally change a person’s life. It’s just words to you but it could be really, deeply important to them.

#best compliment of my life was not even meant as a compliment:#work with a bunch of people we poached from hard STEM studies or careers#have to frequently explain to them the legal-ese framework that underpins their work#because they are numbers people at heart and also most of them have an attention span of 4.3 seconds#and a lot of fast information to monitor in real time#so i always make sure to frequently pause in my talks with them#to say ‘with me so far?’ or ‘make sense?’ and check they’re not lost and still with me#anyway explaining something one time i pause and say ‘make sense?’ and wait for their nod#and he goes ‘everything makes sense when i’m talking with you’#this from someone with absolutely zero poetical affect in their communication style#this was not a line#this was just the facts ma’am#basic ​offhand unthinking comment energy like the above anecdote#istg it hit me like a frying pan to the face (via @harrietvane)

i was working in a charity shop as an awkward, “ugly” teenager in the middle of winter, it’s dark and dingy and early on a Sunday morning.

An old lady walks to the counter. I greet her and begin scanning her books in.

She says, “You’ve such a beautiful smile, dear. It brightens up the whole shop.”

Still makes me smile to this day.

I worked in a grubby suburban liquor store a long time ago and there was a tall, older British customer who rode an orange scooter. He only came in a few times, but we would chat a bit, and once, as he was pocketing his change by the squeaky automatic door that none of us were paid enough to fix, he looked up at me and said, “You know what? I’m glad you’re you.”

maybe it’s just because I’m an Oldfan™ but this book I spotted at the library is absolutely sending me

CHOOSE YOUR AU

I’m

Instead of fanfic being despised, now there’s a chirpy how-to guide for teens. Rock on, gals. 

Anne Rice shits a brick every time she sees this in the library

Happy fanfiction writers’ appreciation day! 

TFW you accidentally come up with your enemies' new theme song.

This comic was so rushed lol. Hope you fellow yankees had a happy and safe 4th of July.

 the only criticism of millennials l accept

The funniest thing about tumblr blaze is that so far all I’ve seen are screenshots of sponsored posts and not actually sponsored posts themselves

everyone talks about how tumblr should make an @everyone feature, but I have another proposal: an @anyone feature. this tags a few users at random and there’s no way of predicting who it will be. this will also solve nothing and make everything worse

omg

you’ve got to be kidding me

Haven’t seen anyone mentioning this on tumblr so far, so here we go:

The voice actors of Medic, Heavy/Demo, Sniper, Spy/Pyro and Helen/GLaDOS are doing a live autograph signing on April 24th 10am PST.

Robin and Gary even recorded a funny little announcement video.

It’s so great to see that the cast still cares about the game so much, even after all those years. (More than Valve does, honestly…)

couples cosplay idea

Ranking tumblr’s new dash messages instead of “you’re all caught up”:

“Peruse our wares” Instant 10/10. I have just wandered into a shop entirely too well stocked for this empty, dusty road far from any town, and the shopkeeper is beckoning me in with a smile a bit too wide that reveals teeth that, if you’re paying attention, appear a touch sharper than one might expect. That is 100% the correct vibe for this faesite. Congratulations, tumblr, you’re off to a strong start.

“Have you seen these lately?” and “Check these out” Generic, bland, forgettable. These are so utterly and completely neutral that I could not possibly score them anything other than 5/10.

“But wait! There is more” This ranks ahead of the last two only because they did not contract “there is” to “there’s.” I will not elaborate why. 6/10

“Content for the content gods” I am being beckoned into a temple to admire the offerings left for another deity. It feels slightly sacrilegious, though I can’t quite put a finger on the reason. 9/10

“Random tour spots” Enticing. Confusing. Where am I again? 7/10

“You’ll wish we recommended these before” By all logical accounts, this is merely a company advertising their product using standard sale speak. Yet for some reason, I feel in my soul that this is a threat upon my life. 9/10

“MORE! MORE!” Sir, if you can’t calm down, I will need to escort you from the premises. 2/10

“Roll the dice” True and slightly ominous. I approve. 8/10

“Take a chance on me” Same as the last but with none of the foreboding, which is instead replaced by a cruel and unnecessary earworm. It’s stuck in my head now. 3/10

“owo what’s this” -10000/10 tumblr why would you do this why why why

Tips for new Tumblr users:

* Liking posts is a good way to bookmark them to find later

* Do not reblog anything between the hours of midnight and dawn or you might summon the Beast

* You can use your queue to post on a schedule even when you’re offline, which is very handy

* Every year on the anniversary of Dashcon staff will pick one user at random and kill them

* You can use simple HTML to put clickable links in your bio

* If you die on Tumblr, you die in real life

What’s the beast?

Just your typical beast. Seven horns, seven heads, seven crowns, comes out of the sea, etc and so forth

not old enough to remember the Tumbeasts, I see

This is why she’s my favorite author.

Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).

More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.

As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”

A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.

So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.

*****

We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.

Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.

We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.

You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane​ says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…

For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.

Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:

This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.

And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.

There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.

Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.

And here’s the effect it produces.

Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.

Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.

This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.

But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.

 It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.

Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.

They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.

Here’s Jason Kingsley making one.

the difference is when you see a stupid take on tumblr it’s usually from either a 14 year old or some 30 something year old shut-in. when you see a stupid take on twitter it’s always like the governor of california or something