jack of no trades. master of fuck all

Albert Pénot

La femme chauve-souris (‘The Bat Woman’), c1890

so diabolical that in order to get things you have to ask for them and in order to ask for things you have to know what you want

Hannigram puppy interview

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

hannibal doing his. stupid. smile . don't fuckin g look at me

he's so happy . he's so happy to be sharing his favorite thing with his favorite person and feeling really truly seen and accepted by someone probably for the first time ever and he can't help smiling And the way he tries to push the smile down when he realizes he's doing it LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!!! GO AWAY!!!!!

i don't know who needs to hear this but you can always straighten up when parking. if your first try isn't the best, you can back up and try again. it's great to think outside the box, but you need to park inside the lines.

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

Studio headshot portrait of American author and dramatist Anita Loos (1888-1981) wearing a shirt with suspenders, ca. 1925 | src Getty images

Dr. Gachey with foxglove, 1890

Some of Van Gogh’s best work was done during a period of his life that he spent in a hospital being treated for his mental health problems. I could be wrong but I think Starry Night was among those.

This is consistently the case. Creators tend to do their best work when they are in a healthy place and receiving proper treatment and not being self destructive in their efforts to cope. Go figure.

All our experiences, good and bad, inform what we create, but suffering is not the price of great art. Suffering is what prevents artists from completing great art.

(I bring to mind this @tkingfisher / Ursula Verson quote about once a week <3)

Also preserved in our archive (Daily updates!)

As one whose loans have been forgiven, I want to frame this more accurately. Biden has taken tremendous heat for forgiving loans that ought to have been paid back and dumping the debt on the taxpayer.

What Biden actually did is what the EXECUTIVE branch of government is meant for: he enforced the law. The contracts for those loans and many more included forgiveness under certain criteria: x years of income-based repayment, 10 years of public service, borrower disability, so on. Borrowers met the criteria and were refused the forgiveness guaranteed in the contracts.

People have gone mad over shaming borrowers for supposedly not fulfilling the terms of their loans, when many exceeded their obligations. Meanwhile few have said a peep against the lenders and servicers that refused to honor the terms they too signed off on. The Biden administration intervened to stop their mass evasion of legal obligations.

In a monumental discovery for paleontology and the first of its kind "Mummy of a juvenile sabre-toothed cat Homotherium latidens from the Upper Pleistocene of Siberia"

Abstract The frozen mummy of the large felid cub was found in the Upper Pleistocene permafrost on the Badyarikha River (Indigirka River basin) in the northeast of Yakutia, Russia. The study of the specimen appearance showed its significant differences from a modern lion cub of similar age (three weeks) in the unusual shape of the muzzle with a large mouth opening and small ears, the very massive neck region, the elongated forelimbs, and the dark coat color. Tomographic analysis of the mummy skull revealed the features characteristic of Machairodontinae and of the genus Homotherium. For the first time in the history of paleontology, the appearance of an extinct mammal that has no analogues in the modern fauna has been studied. For more read here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-79546-1

stole this from the tl but i need to know

Hey there, space cadets!  Just in time for the Spooky Season, my super cool Halloween-themed spooktastic short story “The Wishing Tree” is now available on the Tales to Terrify podcast!  It’s narrated by the indomitable K.M. Hammond which is very cool.

You should go give it a listen if u want to

— Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015), from “Answers to Letters”, in: “The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems”, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton. (New Directions; December 8, 2011) (via finita–la–commedia)