Frodo!!!! that is really a study of Joaquín sorolla’s Italian girl with flowers lol

Don’t you know your Sam? :(

bro… bro have you noticed that this sucks ass… bro..

does anyone else remember grass. the warmth of the sun

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

An actual World Heritage Post

how does this post not have a million notes but anyone online can quote it

one week until ten years of Spiders Georg

WHERES THAT POST FUCK YOU PEOPLE WHO DONT CELEBRATE FICTION CHARACTERS BIRTHDAY

HAPPY 11th BIRTHDAY SPIDERS GEORG!!!!

The main problem with "artist" as a career is that it produces an outsized number of books about writers, failed screenplays about failed screenwriters, films about acting, and cartoons about animation or chilling coolstyle with your pals in not-San Francisco. This isn't even on the artists-- if you drag a guy out of a welding workshop and make him write a book, he'll still think he's supposed to write the next Dr. Seuss but he'll wimp out and call it "Mr. Puppy Learns A Lesson". Consumerism eradicated the uncontacted tribes

I do think that "art has the power to change things" stops applying when your raison d'etre is "I really loved Ghibli films growing up" or "I want to share my kinky power fantasy". To fulfill that phrase, the art should be used as a tool to say important things and make them spread wider. If visual artists are a class who say largely the same things--identity navelgazing, cool things they saw on a screen, safe regurgitated opinions--then the opportunity for change becomes inert. If a bit of world news or history would spice the scene up significantly, things are dire.

That said. Every time someone with no affection for these spaces uses this criticism to paint genAI as harmless, I get one neuron closer to being able to explode people with my mind

This is why I’ve been very critical of going to art or writing school if you want to make ‘good’ art. Not saying it can’t be valuable, especially if you already have a point of view and you’re struggling to find the skills to articulate it. But theres a reason why “40 year old writer getting a divorce,” is such an archetype in pretentious books.

If your whole identity is just Artist then 1. Your ego and personal narrative might get in the way of taking actual risks, and you might get too caught up in emulating what success as an Artiste is expected to look like and end up enmeshing yourself and your voice in an already incredibly inbred scene. Ooor 2. Your artistic narrative becomes the struggles of being an Artist, which roughly 99 percent of artists have some type of opinion on, of which half of them have already made into their own thesis.

I have weird-life-story-privilege, but in general ive always been a proponent of the idea that if you have a creative bone in your body you should just go out and experience a bunch of random ass shit. Become the guy at the welding workshop, delete social media, get really into a specific field that is in no way at all associated with creativity. Make mistakes, take risks and feel the consequences under your skin.

That life changing book you read is that way because the author had their own truth to share. Instead of copying their ideas you need to live your own life until youre left with a question or epiphany that just about forces you to pick up a pencil if only to get it out of your own head. You’re a human being, not a xerox.

YEAH and more practically— dedicating yourself to the study of art as a shut-in online westerner is 1) very fun and 2) priming you to have more skills in production than in having ideas worth producing. But I suppose that’s true of most education these days.

I say this as someone who hasn’t exactly been on a lot of adventures: we unfortunately have no shortage of art by people who don’t go on any adventures. Do a second thing!

early 21st century americans were so modest that they would regularly censor their own feet in video and artistic depictions, and it was considered improper to expose your feet in public — dismissed with cries of "put those grippers away"

collecting these

HOW could i forget this classic

it's amazing how when i'm an active agent in my life good things happen and i feel capable and confident in myself and when i just passively let life happen to me terrible things happen and i am miserable. surely no one else has ever noticed this tendency

does anyone have that 4chan post about the guy who got like. deradicalised from being an incel because he started taking care of shrimp?

i can't post pictures in replies so here u go

thats the one! thank you!

I think of shrimp guy often and I hope he and his shrimp are doing great and if I ever meet him I would love to ask about them

The duffers admitting they know next to nothing about DND because they played magic the gathering growing up…I fear you just need to stop talking. Like. This hole cannot get any deeper I’m begging you to shut it

I'm gonna be honest as fuck. black and brown people end up as victims of systemic violence within the US on a wider scale that is deplorable forever since this country's conception, especially with black Americans. and I will be honest, white liberals and leftists will see this violence, get rightfully upset, but move on. but when another white person is wrongfully murdered and tried by the system those same people will focus more outrage towards that. "they will target all of us now" is a statement made out of privilege if you don't consider the lives of black and brown people as equal.

anything to wake up people but it's just sad that my so called "allies" are realizing how dire this violence is when it only begins to affect **THEIR** lives.

the average experience of a black American is facing racial trauma since Early childhood then and there. you will learn that people who supposedly have your back don't actually fucking care unless they are thrown to the wolves as well, despite you being thrown to the pack as early as being in your parents womb.

I was worried when he didn't rush out to greet me immediately but it was just because he was cozy.

Dnd animation yayy!

What happened in the MCU is that they made Bucky unquestionably a victim and then did not know how to handle it. 

In the comics, Bucky’s brainwashing leaves him with enough agency that his past as the Winter Soldier is absolutely comparable to Natasha’s. Both were used and abused and manipulated, but they maintained enough control over their own actions that it is reasonable to question whether it mattered that they didn’t know who they truly were because they were still people.  In the MCU, they specifically wrote Bucky Barnes as a character whose agency was not just compromised but actually removed. It’s not just torture and coercion, though there are 70 years’ worth of explicit torture and coercion, it’s that for him to act as the Winter Soldier they have to cauterize out what makes him a person. In the MCU Hydra/the Soviets have not one but two ways to do it: the chair and the activation words. The Winter Soldier does not comply without them. This is not a question of a prisoner breaking after years of enslavement. This is explicitly shown as a mechanical way of erasing Bucky’s consciousness and capacity for consent. And it was a choice by the MCU to characterize his captivity like that, much like it was a (subtle) choice to make Bucky a man who was drafted rather than a man who enlisted.  And up to Phase 4 that had played out alright; the characters who see him as culpable are also shown to not be objective (Tony, for example, or Bucky himself). The audience knows better, though, because we are privy to all of the flashbacks and the medical torture and the him being bodily dragged out of cryo to be activated. But then the MCU actually had to confront its choices in TFATWS and they did it in the worse possible manner because they both chose to reinforce the narrative that Bucky was a powerless victim during his enslavement while making his recovery conditional on accepting responsibility for it. They pretend to sell Bucky along with the activation codes. There’s a whole pivotal scene by the firelight where Bucky finally does not respond to the activation codes and Ayo tells him he’s free and that’s because he was not free beforehand. In a storyline which places explicit moral value on refusing the serum, never once was it mentioned that Bucky did not consent to being injected with it in the first place. His situation obviously parallels Isaiah’s, not Steve’s.

But now the audience is being asked to see Bucky as someone who needs to make amends, not just because his therapist says so but because the moral compass of the series, Sam, makes it explicitly clear that what Bucky needs to do is “do the work”.  And this is INSANE. It’s insane. To have Bucky weep when the trigger words wash over him and still, still, try to have the audience buy into the narrative of his recovery as one where he needs to admit wrongdoing is absurd. It would be normal and expected of Bucky to feel wretched guilt over his past but the recovery is overcoming that, not reinforcing it. Bucky admits, word for word, that he had no choice and that would be bad enough, but the Winter Soldier was made to not even conceive of the possibility of choice. 

There can be no culpability without agency and guilt is not a measure of responsibility.

Bucky Barnes has, for ten years of MCU canon, been written as a man who was powerless to stop the abuse that was inflicted on him and now that they have to cash that check the MCU cannot handle it. I don’t even know if it’s because they, like society in general, cannot abide the concept of men - masculine men, especially masculine leading men - as victims but the end result is that TFATWS is an explicit exercise in victim blaming. 

I recently tried to rewatch the series from the beginning, because I thought perhaps I was being biased by the over-analysis that inevitably occurs when waiting week by week for a new episode, but found I couldn’t stomach the hints of victim blaming that was already evident in the therapy session.

Like many things in this series, its stance on trauma was self-contradictory. It had Sebastian beautifully play up the depth of Bucky’s vulnerability and PTSD, only to then crush all the good work by dismissing the very nature of Bucky’s experience - which is that he was a powerless victim whose body and mind were violated to the point where choice and identity did not exist. It places the onus on the victim to accept that “he did that” rather than acknowledge things were done to him. It irks me that the series wants to be woke but can’t even handle the most basic theme of the #MeToo movement.

And yes, Isaiah definitely paralleled Bucky more than Steve, yet he got Sam’s full supportive anger against his perpetrators while Sam - the supposed moral centre of the story - teased Bucky about being a machine and an assassin while being fully aware that Bucky was “still having those nightmares”. Sadly, Isaiah’s ending also only acknowledged his achievements while deftly avoiding any retribution to the people who tortured him.

The appeal of Bucky was this unique story of victimhood and of his incredible resilience in surviving that and still wanting to be a good person. Unlike Nat, his story isn’t the “will he won’t he” double agent story (although that has its own appeal), nor is it Wanda’s “needs constant guidance about morality because she’s only known violence”. The movie canon made clear that Bucky Barnes is a good man who had all his agency ripped away and used to commit atrocities he is consistently horrified by as soon as he regains awareness. For some reason that level of complexity is too much for TFATWS creators to deal with and they decided to force him into the role of a generic masculine hero whose redemption hinges on owning up to his toxic masculinity…when in fact, as people have pointed out, the appeal of his character is actually the female-coded themes that they’ve tried to write out of his history.