Happy new year from the Netherlands! 2021’s pretty nice so far. Already getting used to the hellspiders and the ambient purple glow is very pretty
More you might like
we justifiably give Biden a lot of shit but I think "at least 3" is the funniest possible response to some right wing dipshit asking you how many genders there are
wait it gets better
Master Grimbender's Necromancer dungeon reviews
Average rating: ⭐⭐⭐ 3/5
💎 Danethehero
⭐⭐ 2/5
Barely any loot, too many skeletons, final boss way too easy
🦇 Bat beast
⭐⭐⭐⭐ 4/5
Many dark place to sleep... Many bug to eat.. Very good very good.. Wish bone people were more quiet.. 4 Star.
💀 Skeleton8448576
⭐ 1/5
Master Grimbender doesn't pay us and our provided weapons are insufficient. Cobwebs in my ribs all the time. Don't work here, serve a witch instead
Response from the owner
Rusty swords are the standard weapon for skeletons across all dungeons. If you had such an issue with your provided weapons you should have taken it up with the Necromancers Council
🕷️ Spider
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5
This place fucking rules I love crevices
A friend once said to me "I feel like I'm not actually working at my job because there's so little to do" and I was like "the way I see it, if you can't sleep and you can't jerk off, you're at work no matter what".
And I just realized this gives me a new perspective on homelessness. There's a certain baseline amount of labor you're expected to do in public, finding places to exist unobtrusively, moving when the cops tell you to. No one is ever truly "off the clock" until they're in their own home, if they have one.
I'm sure Michel Foucault or somebody wrote about this long before I did.
Or to put it another way, if home is the "first place" and work is the "second place" then the removal of third places from society means that if you don't have a first place everywhere defaults to being a second place
If existing in public is a job then police are the managers, and calling the cops on someone for sleeping in public is, in effect, snitching on a fellow worker. I guess this functions as an explanation for why police unions "don't count".
The absolute height of the unintentional comedy of life that I have seen was in the finnish glass museum. Interior design is one of those things that's kind of a big deal here, one of those things that people who grew up somewhere are surprised to hear that their country is not all that known for. My friends share it in the group chat every time an american movie or show they're watching has a vase, water glass or candleholder in the background that they immediately spotted was by a finnish designer. I took up a whole paragraph to make it clear that this is A Whole Thing here.
Anyway, in the glass museum, one of the displays was a feast table set with the absolute classics, hits and highlights of finnish glassware designs - the absolutely fanciest plates and serving dishes, wine glasses and water glasses, carafes and pitchers. I could pretty confidently say that the entire presentation, if sold item-for-item, cost more than my first car. Perhaps twice as much, easy. An unfathomably expensive, fancy, finest table set of finnish design that you and I are too poor to ever get our hands on.
And on one of the plates was a dead fly.
And I had never seen anything funnier in my life. All these fine dishes and plates all empty, and on just one plate at the end of the table was a dead fly chilling on its back like that was the whole feast. The main course. One single dead fly. A human could not have thought of anything more absurdly funny than the specific location that one random fly had died out of pure happenstance. I fought myself so hard to keep my volume to museum-acceptable levels that instead of laughing out loud I went straight into hysterical gasping with tears in my eyes. I could not perfectly recreate the image from memory, but I can't let you go before I try to sketch it nonetheless:
you do not have to like fanfiction. if you think fanfiction is cringy & annoying you can just Say That. but any attempt to argue that fanfiction is inherently inferior to other types of writing falls apart under scrutiny.
'most fanfiction is badly written' sturgeon's law is an adage that states '90% of everything is crap'. this was first coined in defence of science fiction, a genre often maligned as inherently inferior to 'real literature' (sound familiar??)
'oh but most fanfiction is worse than published fiction' yes; this is because pro published books go through a heavy selection and editorial process before the public see them. when it comes to quality of writing you are not comparing like to like. the appropriate 1:1 comparison would be fanfiction & amateur original fiction.
i have hung out in multiple online writing spaces & in 'anyone welcome' RL writing groups and can say with reasonable confidence that most original fiction getting produced is just plain mediocre. there's so so much bad original fiction being produced every day. u just never see it.
'you have to wade through so much garbage to find anything worth reading' you ever hear like. a fiction magazine editor describe what their slush pile experience is like??
'ok but fanfiction is bad because it lacks originality, it's better to come up with your own story & ideas' nobody actually thinks this!! people trot this out about fanfiction but like pro published literature is full of retellings of public domain stories and no-one ever argues that they're inherently worse or less creative than works with original plots.
the dividing line between fanfiction & 'original' fiction generally isn't actually originality, it's whether or not it's transformative of a text that's currently under copyright. & i would hope it's self-evident that the copyright status of the text a work is transforming shouldn't have any bearing on its literary merit. why on earth would it??
'but most fanfiction is trope-y and formulaic' yes this is true and yes i do think there's an argument to be made that a work of fiction that's interchangeable with thousands of other works of fiction is lacking in 'literary merit'.
however this is also true of a lot of pro published literature. whole swathes of genres like eg crime & romance exist to give readers the same experience over and over again. are these books bad? maybe! does their existence mean the entire genre they belong to should be written off? obviously no.
'but fanfiction is all about shipping' yeah a lot of fanfiction belongs to the romance & erotica genres. you do not have to like this. but disparagement of romance as a genre has its roots in the fact that it's mainly written & enjoyed by women. its just sexism lads. :(
'fanfiction encourages bad habits in writers' there's some merit to this argument IMO (that's a different rant) but see above re:90% of everything is crap; the presence of bad writing in a genre doesn't mean that the whole genre should be written off.
'what so you think fanfiction is as good as *insert classic novel here*' nobody is saying this; if you see someone arguing that fanfiction is real writing and jump to 'this person thinks MCU coffee shop AUs are culturally significant works of literature', to be blunt, that is a you problem.
'fanfiction just isn't real literature' ok so fiction divides into 'real literature' and 'not real literature'. got it.
[ID: screencap of a tumblr post by user theislandofmisfittoys:
Okay… nice dichotomy, IDIOT ‼ what lies outside it???]
(OP)
"But NORMAL People's Bodies Didn't Look Like That!" ...right?
Some of you may have seen my post about Baroque artists and their realistic depictions of human bodies as having skin and fat.
I've had a lot of negative and frankly fatphobic comments on that post, calling the people in the paintings "fat" and "obese," mostly along the lines of this:
"It's because the artists are depicting rich people, who were fat and lazy. Normal people didn't look like that!"
The idea, of course, is that these artists wouldn't have ever drawn bodies that looked like those in the Baroque paintings, if they weren't painting super-rich people that stuffed themselves with food all day.
Supposedly. We'll see how well that holds up.
Today I was in the library looking at a collection of drawings by Albrecht Dürer, and learned that in the early 1500's, Dürer tried to put together essentially a "how-to-draw" book, showing how to draw people. His work was controversial, because of his technique of "constructing" figures using rules about proportions. (A quick and easy method of inventing realistically proportioned bodies out of thin air? Cheating!!)
However, in his "constructed" drawings, Dürer had to figure out how to handle the range of variety in bodies, and ended up breaking down how to create a variety of body types in correct proportions.
I'm showing the women, to contrast with the post on Baroque paintings. Here are some of his drawings that I thought y'all should take a look at.
These are a couple of his more "average" women—the one on the left is from his drawing book, and the one on the right is one of his drawings.
Here's a "strong woman" and "A very strong, stout woman"
This is what he refers to as a "stout woman."
Here's where it gets interesting: this is what Albrecht Dürer refers to as a "peasant-type" woman
^That. That's what a "peasant" body type looks like.
He labeled this one "A peasant woman of 7 head lengths"
in case you missed it: this figure drawing by a guy in the 1500's is literally labeled as being of a peasant woman! this is what a "peasant woman" body type looks like!
He did draw similar amounts of thinner figures, but they're not particularly emphasized over the "Strong" and "Stout" figures. Nor is there exactly a "default" figure. He's just...going over the range of variations that there are?
Here's another "stout woman," covered in notes on how to draw the proportions:
now that's too technical for me to make any sense of but
this was in the 16th century!! This body type was apparently not incredibly rare in the 16th century. This body type was important enough for you to be able to draw, as an artist, in the 16th century to be handled in detail in a 16th century artist's drawing advice
In conclusion: yes this is just what people look like, yes it's important to know how to draw fat bodies, even this dude from the early 1500's is telling you so, Die Mad About It
all of this is from "The complete drawings of Albrecht Dürer" by Walter L. Strauss
me when im in an Area
That's a guy alright
he's so fucking over there
And brother he's in a Place
