dobdob reblogged
some witcher outfits
dobdob reblogged
dererumvita-art
“The red thread of fate” Or “When you help bae slay a monster, but he’s a f***ing douchebag and ditches you on a desert island, like thanks for nothing Theseus, you son of a b**ch”
dobdob reblogged
dererumvita-art
My obsession for historical costuming has found expression in this project I've been working on since April and that will likely come out next year.
lol
Checked to confirm. It’s true, it’s recent, and the source is beautiful
(also the ‘children’s charity’ Lumos doesn’t recognize trans children, so this failed fundraising event is an all around good thing)
Oh gods, alright. Of course Livraria Lello would be the one to have it. I wonder if they were trying to get rid of it?
I actually would like to talk about Lello and their relationship with Harry Potter and also just ask you to visit the bookstore.
So, anyway, Lello opened in 1906 in Porto, North of Portugal.
JK. Rowling lived in Porto for a bit in the 90’s, where she first started writing the Harry Potter series. It was said she might have frequented it and some important stairs from the book were based on Lello’s stairs. In fact: The book release of Harry Potter and The Cursed Child happened in Lello.
What this meant is that this bookstore ended up having to fight to remain a bookstore. There are so many tourists, a lot of them that only wanted to look at it because it was Harry Potter related somehow and buy nothing. There were (and still are) insane queues to enter the bookstore.
Lello, who wasn’t particularly interested in becoming a Harry Potter museum, ended up having to make a system where people have to pay to enter. If you buy a book that goes above the price you paid for the ticket, the money you paid will be deducted from the book price.
I can tell from going there fairly frequently that they try to be less connected to Harry Potter as possible if they can manage. Yeah they have the books for sale but they also have a plethora of books and their own merchandise to choose from.
Despite JK. Rowling’s involvement with the bookstore, in the Portuguese Wikipedia page, even in the part about the famous writers that went there, there isn’t a single mention of her. Zero. Not in the history nor anywhere else. It’s beautiful.
Last time I went they had an exhibition about José Saramago’s work (portuguese author who won the Nobel Prize) and on the upper side of the stairs had an enormous collection of winners of the Nobel Prize and authors Lello concidered had the quality to also have won (it the Nobel Prize existed when they were alive) and authors that might win.
It’s quite interesting because all was very thought out and you had a whole reason as to why those books were there. Me and my mother ended up chatting for a long while with one of the bookshop employees (they have a lot of young employees btw) and we even ended up chatting with other foreigners that went there shopping.
Also, did I mentionthe bookshop is gorgeous?
As are their book editions (my English edition of Tom Sawyer I bought there)
Have also a photo of the bookstore from 1906 :)
So, if you go there, please don’t go because of Harry Potter. And please don’t shit on it because of Harry Potter too. It’s a very good bookstore and it deserves recognition, but not from there.
dobdob reblogged
I always hire my guests to help me with ‘chores’ (if they’re willing!), the kind of task that’s fun at first but less fun when you have to keep going for hours (burning all the broom bushes in the pasture, picking many kg of berries to make syrup, carrying a mountain of logs into the wood shed and building stable log piles so they don’t come cascading down later…) And every time I’m amazed by the way humans can make the most tedious tasks genuinely fun through… group dynamics? just the way people start interacting and bonding with each other when everyone is focused on the same repetitive physical activity. It’s hard to find examples because it’s always so specific to each situation; but I mean things like
- people spontaneously specialising and developing a feeling of expertise and pride in their subtrade, no matter how silly (putting away firewood involved one Log Selecter outside going back and forth delivering logs to two Pile Builders who piled them up in the shed, and each rapidly created their own well-oiled System and became convinced it would be hard to replace them now that they had mastered their craft)
- new vocabulary being coined and immediately adopted (the Pile Builders came up with nicknames for logs of different lengths and shapes so they could ‘order’ them from the Log Selecter more efficiently—”I’ve got a One-Armed Bandit here, I need another one to fit next to it, but with an ‘arm’ on the other side” “Here” “The arm is on the same side!” “Just turn it around and the arm will be on the other side”)
- songs emerging almost by themselves (a song about fishing mussels was repurposed into a song about picking plums; a whole new song was invented to encourage weirdly-shaped logs to fit in with the others as we tried to fill all the gaps)
- stories being told. Weaving a trivial task into a complex imaginary plot and context to make it more entertaining and meaningful
- the extremely human compulsion to write down our knowledge to share it with future generations (I was told to take note of the best & quickest knot to tie up foliage when making tree hay, for the benefit of whoever does it next summer)
- beliefs as to the Right Way To Do Things quickly solidifying into myths or superstitions, as we forget what drove us to do things this way in the first place, but trust that we had good reasons so now it’s the Way It’s Done
I always tell people to help only if they feel like it and we can stop anytime and I’ll finish later by myself, but what usually happens instead is that they want to come back at the same time next year to do this exact chore again because of how they’ve made it theirs in just a few days (or in one afternoon!) Give a group of humans a banal task and while they’re at it they will come up with a whole new inside slang, a few work songs and a handful of founding texts and myths, until it feels special and important. I love seeing the way these miniature folklores just emanate from people doing things together.
And this is how culture and tradition is made folks
Walk into your kitchen at 3am and this wizard is waiting for you, having drunk your beer and sampled, but disliked, your potato chips, hasn’t done the dishes, and he isn’t happy
What do you do?
“Really, Carl? Really? Christ, I knew the breakup with Cindy was bad-but not THIS bad! How’d you even get in my house? Why are the Utz all over the floor? Wh- how did you get in my house!?”
“Damn your fool’s mind, Randy, the mists of dream still you know my Amulet of Saros allows me passage through all portals, physical and arcane. I came here as this apartment provides protection from the mental ravaging of that dark sorceress, Cindy, gods blast her name! Your fermented beverages are all that have kept me from darkness this night, Randy, would you turn me away in this hour of terror?”
certified iconic post
dobdob reblogged
On the one hand, I know the Brides are meant to be monstrous sorority sisters there to terrorize, murder, and/or forcibly drag Jonathan into the ranks of the bloodthirsty undead in the fullest violation of life, personhood, consent, and free will
On the other hand, all I can picture at the moment is:
Bride 1: Girlies, terrible news. Bloodbag the Boytoy ran away from home <:(
Bride 2: But we didn’t even get to show him his matching coffin <:(
Bride 3: I made this diaphanous white nightie just for him <:(
Brides 1-3: <:( <:( <:(
dobdob reblogged
The Lunar Eclipse was last night…. perfect timing for tuning this Flower Blood Moon zither :)
less “if you see a man and woman together at pride be nice! they could be bi/pan/trans/ace/aro” and more “stop gendering strangers to harass them anywhere, but especially at pride holy shit”
you know what? i want this to reach the people who do this– especially the ones claiming to support trans folk (usually in really hollow ways lol i’m not bitter). keep reblogging– i want this sentiment to be widespread and for people to stop gendering strangers! especially in explicitly LGBTQ+ spaces!
“No cops at Pride” includes you, you gatekeeping little demons. You aren’t there to police who “looks right” or who seems like they’re “allowed to be there”. Just don’t fucking harass strangers, it’s not that hard.
Narrative Town
Summary: You don’t ever want to be the main character. In your town, that’s deadly. Someone has to warn the new kid.
——–.
Someone has got to tell the new kid in town the Rules.
“Hey,” you say.
The new kid looks up at you. He’s sitting at his desk in the back corner of the classroom, right next to the windows. It’s a chilly day, but he’s got the window open so that the breeze ruffles his curly, black hair. “What’s up? Fern, right?”
“Don’t call me by my name,” you snarl. Then, realizing what you’ve done, you look over your shoulder. The other teenagers are still looped around the teacher’s desk, trying to get Ms. Slauson to move the test date so they could organize a welcome part for the new kid. “I need to talk to you. Privately.”
The new kid leans back in his chair and studies you. You know what he sees – a completely average high school girl in jeans, a sweatshirt, and a ponytail. There’s nothing remarkable about you. He tilts his head. “You don’t look like a bully.”
You frown. “I’m not.”
“You’re being awfully threatening,” he says in a drawl.
The accent is going to be a problem. It’s southern and sounds really cool. Honestly, it might be too late for him already.
But you still have to try.
“Meet me on the rooftop—no!” You press the heel of one hand against your eye. Fight it, you tell yourself. Fight it! “Meet me at the supermarket on Western Street. The dairy aisle. After school.”
“Okay…?”
You spin on your heel, head throbbing. Meeting on the rooftop is against the rules. You glance up at the ceiling uneasily. You’re not usually affected by the compulsion so badly. Are you being targeted?
If you were smart, you wouldn’t show up to the meeting. You’d just let the guy get sucked into the madness on his own.
But you also really need to buy some milk.
dobdob reblogged
By Kawanabe Kyōsai (Japanese, 1831-1889)
Just in time for Aromantic Awareness Week! I think mantises should be associatiated with aromantic, like frogs. Proof: - green - this pun
[ID: Art in the style of Art Noveau of a praying mantis, in light green with darker colors for the tips of its claws, shown from the front in the center of the piece and surrounded by swirling decals in shades of green, which create a border, and outside that is bushy leaves and white roses on a light blue background. End ID.]
dobdob reblogged
Did a little more work on Senua.
dobdob reblogged
Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?
Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"
Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.
Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.
It is free.
It is legal.
I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.
I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.
Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!
If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!
And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!
I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!
Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!
it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!
dobdob reblogged
bigwordsandsharpedges
When I was a kid, I thought those pillars went down to the sea floor.
In reality, they usually go down to some large submerged floats.
I dislike this.
Pillars and floats like that are pretty stable, compared to regular boats, so there’s even a research vessel, called FLIP, that purposefully capsizes itself to be more steady when conducting research.
YEA IT FUCKIN IS (id embedded in image)
