Arrrgh I already complained about it but man. Fucking hate how weird people are when it comes to sexuality in art. "Ohhh this only exists because the writer was horny it can't possibly have anything deep to say" fucking imagine if we applied it to other emotions. Sorry Antigones can't possibly be about anything meaningful the writer was clearly just sad. Hamlet isn't a good or interesting play actually it was just Shakespeare being angry.

#this is a dog committing what are obviously cat crimes - azzandra

Another case where the camera was clearly set up to figure out how the little shit was pulling it off

ポートフォリオ

Nobody ever talk to me about the catholics going off with stained glass again because not one window of jesus has ANYTHING on the Nasir al-Mulk Mosque

Click through this link i’m losing my mind its gorgeous

i absolutely love seeing people’s reactions to the pink mosque 😂

the style is called “orsi” and is unique to iran

and stained glass traces its roots to south west and west asia, developed in ancient times and well before the europeans and the roman empire saw it and said “hey i like that, i’ll be leaving with it”

and while we’re talking about mosques in iran, may i present persian mirror work?

yes, these are real places! it’s a different mosque in the same city as the first picture (the shah cheragh mosque in shiraz)

every time someone tries to talk to me about western churches and architecture and their superiority to that of “third world countries” i have to laugh a little at the ignorance, especially when our mosques look like this

More unconventional world-threatening disasters for your heroes to fight

unknown graves

Magnetic ball in magnetic putty

me trying to get comfortable in my covers at night

thats the kind of thing i would love to just have in a little jar on my shelf so that when people came over they would be really unnerved by the mysterious shifting blob i have in a flask and i would refuse to acknowledge its existence

dnd paladin character concept: a knight raised alongside a magic user, who loves his friend, considers them family — but the magic user through a twist of fate ascends to godhood, vanishing from normal human life. so the knight swears fealty to the fledgling god so he can have some connection to them even still & the god who loves him dearly in return blesses him with gifts and divine powers as a way to reach back toward him, back toward earth. this paladin’s vows are easy to keep, like second nature… and prayer is both automatic and personal

can you imagine being a new god’s firstborn devotee? their most beloved, their milk tooth? he knew his god when they were a lanky teenager and helped lie for them when they used to sneak out of their studies. the two of them would crack each other up late at night until they thought they might hurl. no other paladin knows his god as intimately and well — he saw them pimply and awkward and human and real, and worships them even still. that kind of devotion is impossible to manufacture

the paladin chooses a quest to follow, with the caveat “should my god allow it.” he goes to pray by the river — they used to seek the river together every time they made large decisions, and it was by a river he swore his sacred oaths — and murmurs “will you allow it, old friend?” to the water. a flower blooms at his bent knee. (his god trusts his judgement; they will never forbid him any path he requests to follow.)

Aoraki/Mt. Cook, South Island, New Zealand

Hand study gao hang 5x6 feet Acrylic on raw canvas 2023

this one of those pieces where I look at it and think “oh that’s funny, i’ll reblog,” and then look at the art medium and lose my mind

I’ve been having fun going back to older drawings in my sketchbook and adding blacklight secrets 🔍

The Bachelor: Vietnam - Contestant confesses to another contestant

They ended up getting married so safe to say she doesn’t regret it

Can we discuss how fucking cute they are tho?

What Minh Thu and Truc Nhu have, I want for myself with whatever woman I find to put up with my annoying ass.

FUCKING GOOD FOR THEM!!! 😭

there must be a better place you could be doing that

his only cutting board is nailed to the floor in the turtle room

mario party minigame

Friendly reminder

the thing about f1nn5ter for me is like, it really highlights how much "clocking" someone is complete bullshit, because here's a cis dude who 100% can "pass" as a cis woman just with some makeup and padding. which makes me seethe with rage every time i think about depictions of trans people as someone wearing an ill-fitting costume, because here's someone who actually IS wearing a costume and he's frequently confused for a girl. like i know trans people have been saying for ages that these bullshit ways of "proving" someone is one or the other are in fact nonsense, but its nice to see someone else joyfully engaging with gender like its just a big stupid game. girl month. who cares.

I get that this is intended to be funny, but just so people are aware the Bunting map (on the left) is not intended to be cartographically useful. It is intended to show a theological conception of the world, where Jerusalem is the center, and to make a visual reference to the three leafed clover on the arms of Hanover, Bunting's home. It's art, not a serious map.

A serious cartographic map from the era looked more like this:

THESE CLOWNS OUT HERE IGNORING THE ENTIRE HALL OF MAPS IN THE VATICAN CITY LITERALLY DONE IN 1580

THESE MAPS ARE AT LEAST 80% ACCURATE

WHICH IS SIMILAR TO OUR CURRENT MERCATOR MAP.

The Waldseemüller Map. 1507, German cartographer, first to use the name "America" for the New World.

Don't get me started on late medieval/Renaissance nautical maps. DO FUCKING NOT. You're all lucky that my external HDD on which I had a collection of about 500 of those decided to die as a Christmas present and now I have to search for images online instead of uploading them directly, so this will be a quick and short post. Sorry if it's not very ordered.

So, @socialmaya (because if I don't tag people, no one will read this).

Yes, in the early to high middle ages, Christian European maps were very schematic. There were the so-called T-O maps, with the internal seas (Black and Mediterranean) in a T shape, dividing Europe, Africa and Asia, and surrounded by the O-shaped world ocean:

Then, a bit more detailed, Beatus maps, depicting the known world still as a more or less monolithic island in the world ocean:

Until eventually, in ca. 1000-1100 AD they became highly complex, if very inaccurate maps of the old world, like the Ebstorf map:

Those maps were simplified, since as per Christian canon the mortal world was sinful and not worth depicting in detail, from earlier maps like the 700 AD Ravenna cosmography:

which was itself based on maps from Antiquity such as the one by Anaximander:

The map by Muhammad Al-Idrisi, also known as Tabula Rogeriana (made for King Roger II of Sicily) did lay the foundation for later mapmaking and it itself is the result of Islamic cartography having evolved directly from Ancient Greek cartographers like Anaximander and Ptolemy because the Islamic golden age was a time when classical works were preserved, examined and built upon in the Muslim world, unlike in the Christian one.

And then came the 1200s and European sailors started demanding more accurate maps for navigating the seas for trade and war. At that point, mostly the Mediterranean and Black seas, to trade with the Levant and the Golden Horde. Thus came to be the portolan maps, made specifically for seafaring.

The earliest known map of this type is the so called Carte Pisane, or the map from Pisa:

As you can see, it encompasses the Mediterranean and Black seas, which would be true for most such maps for centuries to come. It is also covered in numerous, intersecting lines - the so-called "rhumblines" radiating from several central points on the map which were used for navigation before map projection was a thing.

Portolans drew on Arabic cartography and there was some back-and-forth exchange of cartographic knowledge around the Mediterranean. First, there was the Genoese cartographic school, product of which were the Carta Pisana and the earliest example of an illuminated portolan map, such as the Lucca chart, again from ca. 1300-1320:

Early Genoese cartographers this codified the portolan map as the principal map type of the age, which was to yield important navigational and political information (well not really, flags were often obsolete by hundreds of years, I've seen Byzantine eagles over Constantinople on maps made 100+ years after the city fell, etc.)

Maps encompassing the whole then-known world, also known as *mappae mundi* (literally "maps of the world"), evolved independently from portolans, although often by the same cartographers: from the T-O and Beatus maps, through Arabic world maps, to accompany portolan maps and atlases. A shining example are the maps (ca. 1320) by Genoese cartographer Pietro Vesconte:

And then the ABSOLUTE MASTERPIECE of Fra Maro, a Franciscan monk, from ca. 1450:

(image limit hit so link)

The practice then went to the kingdom of Aragon where (mostly Jewish) cartographers would spread from Genoa to Mallorca and Barcelona, founding the Catalan map school:

1375, Abraham Cresques (the so-called Catalan atlas):

Venetians, Portuguese, French and others soon followed, founding their own portolan making traditions.

Diogo Homem (Portugal), 1563:

Muslim (Arab and later Ottoman) cartographers also would make portolans sometimes:

1461, Ibrahim Al-Mursi from Tunis (sorry, lost my good copy):

Then, in the 1480s, a copy of the Cosmpgraphia, an atlas by the Ancient Greco-Roman cartographer Claudius Ptolemaus was discovered, leading to the rediscovery of polar projection:

(13th century Byzantine Greek copy)

Thus cartographers like Sebastian Münster (early 1500s) and Gerhard Mercator (late 1500s) were able to build on those foundations.

Sebastian Münster, Cosmpgraphia, 1550:

Abraham Ortelius, Typus Orbis Terrarum, 1572:

So yeah, the "BLERGH STOOPID YUROPIAN MAPP" is bullshit. That one is a very symbolic map no one at the time believed was true. There are other allegorical maps, such as Münster's "Europe as Queen":

@sugarpenchant - A Gift

Fidget Spinner Earth

yeah i'll add fidget spinner earth to my belief system

Love the argument "oh but if you transition you'll have to deal with being trans your whole life" because first of all there is nothing bad about being trans and second I'm still gonna be trans even if I don't medically transition I'll just be trans and miserable instead of trans and happy

Every time I hear someone say something like this I remember that one exerpt from that one book in which the author considers Gomez Addams as a trans man specifically because he has the energy of a guy who wakes up every day absolutely over the moon to discover that he gets to be a man with a family and a moustache and a wife who's taller than god yet again, and it becomes painfully apparent that people who say these things don't understand transness at all.

EDIT: I found it! Here it is!

An excerpt from the essay “Powerful T4T Energy in Steve Martin’s The Jerk” by Daniel M. Lavery, from his book Something That May Shock and Discredit You.

Absolutely amazing addition I love this and personally I can't wait to be proudly trans for the rest of my life!

if you're wondering what the big deal is about the louis-philippe sentence in les misérables, it is, in the original french, 760 words long. the subject of the sentence doesn't appear until 95% of the way through, at word #711; the main verb is word #712. the sentence contains 91 commas and 49 semicolons and is almost entirely a list of laudatory adjectival phrases describing the erstwhile king of france. this is perhaps especially notable because les mis is, shall we say, not known for being particularly gung-ho about the monarchy.

this sentence takes up more than one single-spaced page in Word. in the 1800-page folio classique edition, it is fully two and a half of those pages. that means that les mis is 0.14% this single sentence. more of les mis is made up of this sentence than earth's atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide (0.04%). if the page count of les mis stayed the same but every sentence was the length of this one, les mis would consist of only 720 sentences total.

incidentally, guess who named hugo a peer of france 17 years before the publication of les mis?