The trope where people don’t recognize each other because it’s been so long since they last interacted and they’ve both changed so much that they’re basically strangers UNTIL one of them does their Signature Thing™ and the other just stops dead because oh. It’s YOU. All at once it’s so clearly you
This flavor of reblog to this post always makes me laugh so hard thank you
That’s such a sick baby picture to have. The rest of us are all like “oh this is me tripping in the backyard when I was 2” and that baby’s gonna have “yeah that’s me in my mom’s arms as she wins a mortal Kombat tournament”. Iconic.
Girl help they’re selectively breeding the world’s most powerful Mortal Kombat player.
Need a game that’s actually built around tanking as the main combat style. Not a game where you can, strictly speaking, build a character as a tank.
A game where the systems are built from the ground up assuming that you, the player, will be putting yourself in front of world-ending threats, standing up straight, and blocking the enemy.
Not dodge-rolling, not skipping around going “tee hee hee i’m a lil guy you can’t hit”, blocking.
And not as a disappointing alternative to a damage build!
Need the CLANG of the enemy’s attacks against armor, need clear sound and UI design that communicates “here’s how much damage you DIDN’T take, you absolute badass”, need a little gaggle of frail party members trembling in fear behind me as the extreme aura farming of walking up to a dragon and putting my entire shield in its mouth inspires them to fight on.
Also the player character should be a huge woman who’s into women.
Art forgery is the best crime tbh. It requires absolutely incredible artistic talent, technical skill, and attention to detail to make convincing fakes. Does anyone get hurt from it? No! The only people who suffer for it are the extremely wealthy who want the prestige of having original paintings in their own homes. It’s full of international intrigue and mystery. Perfect.
Also… art forgers like van Meegeren sometimes become a kind of folk hero. A swindler, sure, but a gentleman’s swindler.
I liked this guy’s story, Mark Landis, who conned several dozen museums into displaying his forgeries, but when the FBI came after him they couldn’t do anything because he had always given them away as donations. They said if they could have found that he’d ever taken anything in exchange they would have prosecuted him, but all he wanted was get to out of the house and meet people.
“The first painting Landis “donated” was a copy of a work by Maynard Dixon, an artist well-known for his paintings of cowboys and Indians. It started as impulse, Landis says, but then “everybody was just so nice and treated me with respect and deference and friendship, things I was very unused to — I mean, actually not used to at all. And I got addicted to it.””
And it looks like all his forgeries are done with cheap materials, like markers and Hobby Lobby frames.
Ok, but Wolfgang Beltracchi is probably one of the best Fraud Artists in the world.
His career brought him millions upon millions of dollars and lasted almost 40 years. He finally admitted to painting fraudulent art after the white paint he used came under scrutiny.
In The interview with Beltracchi, he said that none of his forgeries are copies, they’re all original works that the famous artists could have painted.
His wife was also in on the scam, she would dress up in old clothing and take pictures holding the paintings with old cameras to fake proof of the paintings’ ages.
At the end of the interview with Wolfgang Beltracchi he was asked if he felt he had done anything wrong, his answer was “ Yeah, I used the wrong kind of paint”
Just … the levels of con there, the fake photos and … wow. That’s incredible.
That’s just rapscallionry.
This is what AI wants to take from us.
Let’s add Tom Keating to the mix, yeah?
Keating painted more than 2,000 forgeries by over 100 different artists in his sixty-six years. Many had fraudulently sold at auctions with the total profits estimated at over 10 million dollars. “I flooded the market with the work of Palmer and many others,” the artist said. “Not for gain (I hope I am no materialist) but simply as a protest against the merchants who make capital out of those I am proud to call my brother artists, both living and dead. It seemed disgraceful to me how many of them had died in poverty,” he defended in The Fake’s Progress, his autobiography. “All their lives they had been exploited by unscrupulous dealers and then, as if to dishonor their memory, these same dealers continued to exploit them in death.” […] Keating had a great respect and understanding of all the artists he imitated but was always reckless in his handling of the materials. He often used house paint and poster paint to mix in with his acrylics as a cheaper way to achieve the impasto works. At times he wouldn’t bother preparing his antique canvases he found at the junk shops out of laziness, so that in just a few years the paint would peel right off to reveal what was originally underneath. Keating often planted what he called “time bombs” like this in his paintings. Because of his understanding of the chemicals used in art restoration, Keating would purposely paint with layers of glycerin, which would destroy the painting once it was cleaned by a restorer, proving it was a fake. He often wrote obscenities under his paintings, like “Bollocks!”, in lead white so that it could be seen by the experts who x-rayed the painting to check its authenticity.
joining the war on kids reading any book they want on the side of kids reading any book they want. simply you will be fine. it’s even good to be confronted with things you don’t understand and even find upsetting, uncomfortable and difficult. it’s a surprise tool that will help you later.
My laptop ran an update while I was sleeping last night which would’ve been fine except that the fan pad it sits on has rgb lights that fire up whenever the the computer first powers on, so in the middle of the night my computer finished its restart sequence and this happened:
Also I need you all to know that I made that gif myself purely because it was the only way I could think of to adequately relay my experience.
“Why do you sleep in the same room as your computer/why don’t you turn it off all the way before bed?” I usually use it to play audiobooks because it’s easier for me to fall asleep that way.
“Why do you have gamer lights?” I needed a cooling pad for my laptop and they came baked in.
“Why do computers update in the middle of the night?” Because it’s usually less annoying than having them try to update during the day while you’re using them. Usually.
“This happened to me too.” We are siblings-in-arms, separated by time and space but bound together by a shared suffering (getting flashbanged by technology in the middle of the night).
The Moon is a card of illusion and deception, and therefore often suggests a time when something is not as it appears to be. Perhaps a misunderstanding on your part, or a truth you cannot admit to yourself.