nekobakaz reblogged
Instead of Light It Up Blue for Autism Awareness, Red Instead for Autism Acceptance Month.
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jeerimoon-deactivated20230908
Big fan of the situation under his hood
@loud-shimo-screes *whispers* Waffle Cotton
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the ysalamir watching thrawn have his 2827283nd meltdown:
Ok hear me out. Because you KNOW Snickerdoodle has this kind of relationship with Khema. Like. "You feed me and therefore I tolerate you, but also sometimes you put me in that box thing and I get bumped around so much I start to hate you. But then you feed me again and I guess we're ok. What even ARE you??
Oh I agree with this 100%! Lizard probably HATES the box! (And Saris would like the lizard box as far away as possible in combat. :'D)
Meira and the lizard hisses at each other whenever they have to acknowledge each other’s existence
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I got the Top 4.47% on this English Vocabulary test
I’m in the last 47.33%
I shouldn’t have taken that test
shimomcdragon
Am I fucking stupid LMAO
cool. cool cool cool.
im- im an english major i hate it here
The only thing being a native English speaker has done for me: let me guess things accurately!
tempusumbra
English is not my mother language so this is higher than I expected it to be already LMAO
This is so funny when you consider English isn’t my mother language either and I literally chose half of the words randomly😭
I are a riter
....
i guessed some of those. i have no idea how this happened
nekobakaz reblogged
happy paprika day!
happy paprika day!
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hanging out in voice call with @loud-shimo-screes and he keeps exclaiming “But I’m a Good Little Sith!” while playing SWTOR and I’m like “do... do you hear yourself?”
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nekobakaz reblogged
So I work at a post office and somebody called me today and asked if they could ship fish to the US, and I wasn’t 100% sure, so obviously I went “let me just check the prohibited goods section of my shipping binder real quick”. Flipped all the way to the US section, found what I was looking for and sent them on their way. But of course naturally after they’d left I’d still had the book open, so naturally I was curious and decided to check it out, and let me tell you, there is some WILD stuff in this book.
•You’re not allowed to ship playing cards to Italy.
•Antarctica simply says refer to Australia. The epitome of logic.
•Andorra is just sad. You’re not allowed to ship artwork, drawings, books or toys of any kind, musical instruments, sheet music, cutlery, furniture, several types of paper, shoes??? It has the longest list of restrictions I’ve come across so far and it’s a country that has a total population of less people than my local college.
•Apparently you aren’t allowed to ship clothing to Ireland, but it only specifies men’s or women’s clothing, so like non-binary people stay winning.
•Only a handful of countries specifically mention that you aren’t allowed to ship asbestos, so like RIP to the rest of the world I guess.
•The US has some very specific things prohibited, including “a knife, gaff, or any other sharp object attached or intended to be attached to the leg of a bird for use in animal fighting ventures” ????
•Canada is the only country I have found so far that specifically states that you cannot ship hate propaganda, which I thought was nice. But then again, it also specifies that you cannot ship any beekeeping apparatuses, but do you know what you CAN ship? LIVE FUCKING BEES.
•There are several countries which seem to be in direct competition with one another, ie pairings of countries that have specifically stated they will not accept anything made in the other country and vice versa.
•You can’t ship things to China that were made in China.
I’m having the time of my life right now.
..... that last one. that explains some returns I’ve attempted over the years simply did not work
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You are a small god, with very little power or influence. But you are happy, and take care of your few worshippers as much as you are able. An extraordinarily powerful being stumbles bloodied into your sacred place, and cries “Sanctuary.”
thanks to @writing-prompt-s for this prompt!
—–
I sense them coming from a thousand miles off. They move like a tear through the fabric of reality, stitching and unstitching, leaving a trail of fifth dimensional embroidery in their wake. Lots of Great Ones pass this way—Death is not so far over my horizon, and many seek their lands for rescues and redemptions and respite. Few return. But that is not my concern.
What is my concern: this Great One is not heading down the well-trodden path to Death. They are heading towards me. Towards my little temple, safe and sequestered at the edge of all things. Defensible. But not particularly escapable.
Ten minutes later and my acolytes can feel it too. The few temporarily sheltering here cluster around my altar. They are all too well-practiced to tremble or cry, even as the approaching onslaught threatens to pop their ear drums and crack the marrow from their bones. Instead, calloused hands curl around favoured weapons. “Boss?”
“Yeah, this one’s not for you guys. Not sure it’s for me, either, but I have a slightly lower chance of going ‘pop’. Get your butts to the catacombs and prep for evacuation.” I scrabble together enough power to materialise, so I can look each of them in the eye. “Which means if you feel me die, or flee, you run. Got it?”
A chorus of affirmatives that only half of them mean fill the cloister, the echoes still bouncing as they file down through the secret passages in the floor. I lock the trapdoors behind them. It won’t keep them out forever, but hopefully it’ll hold long enough to keep them from doing anything completely stupid. Like coming back to rescue me from certain death.
Like they haven’t done that before.
The Great One hits the foot of my mountain, brushing through the meagre wards like fragile spider webs. They jerk up the rockface, not quite walking, not quite climbing, just…moving upward. Raking pitons and claws and wings through the fabric of space-time, and sealing it behind them in flares of sunlight and gold. Still, they don’t clean everything. I can feel their blood splattering my domain.
It tastes like an offering. Like a sacrifice.
Hmm.
there are at least FIVE ladybugs in my apartment. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more.
which has me conflicted. do I take care of them during the winter months? I don’t have any real plants! (how do I take care of them?) the temperature is dropping, do I just catch and throw outside?
O bug people of Tumblr, what should I do?
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Transcript:
Hey, wait a minute, I recognize this painting! That’s “Vir Heroicus Sublimis” by Barnett Newman. It’s funny you put him in this video, because someone actually tried to recreate, or “restore”, one of his paintings and it failed miserably.
Barnett Newman is arguably one of the most well known abstract expressionist painters, and for good reason; his work made people FURIOUS. Newman was most well known for his very large paintings with stripes (or, he called them “zips”) straight down the painting. One of his most famous works is “Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue”, a series of four paintings, all very similar to this, with varying sizes of zips on each side, with this very overwhelming red. They were displayed in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam until 1986, a guy named Gerard Jan van Bladeren slashed them with a box cutter. And this wasn’t just one measly poke, this was like 50 feet worth of slashes in this painting. They were mortified, saying the painting was murdered, and others rejoiced, saying that Bladeren should be the head of museums across the world. Bladeren himself never even admitted guilt, he said his slashes were works of art in their own right.
Still, the Stedelijk was like, “We gotta get this painting restored!”, but no one would take them up on the job because regardless of how you feel about Barnett Newman’s work, his craft has an undeniable truth. His work is seamless. It doesn’t matter how close you get to this thing, you practically can not see brush strokes. Anyone who’s worked with paint, let alone oil paint, knows how difficult that is, but that’s particularly difficult for art restoration. Anyone who’s binged enough Baumgartner Restoration videos like I have knows two things about art restoration: “You can hide seams in detail” and “Every bit of restoration work MUST be reversible”. So as you can imagine, 50 feet worth of slashes on a piece with literally no detail to hide it in, with the entire art world looking on to make sure you did it right, was probably not the easiest job. But someone eventually did step up to the plate.
That person was Daniel Goldreyer in 1991. He was less of an art restorer and more of someone who looked at the painting and said “Hey, I could do that.”. Nearly a decade and $4000 later, he made this, which people at the Stedelijk Museum literally wrote in and said they were angry that it wasn’t the same one that made them as angry as before. Close analyzation of the restoration after the fact revealed that it was done with a paint roller and wall paint, which is not removable. He had destroyed the painting, AGAIN. The restoration even angered Bladeren, who went on to slash another painting.
Listen, you don’t have to love Barnett Newman, he’s not my favorite either, but he was a Jewish man trying to figure out what to paint after World War II, and successfully making these really large overbearing paintings with incredible technical precision at a time where you couldn’t even go to Michaels because it didn’t exist! If you really think you can do it, give it a try; worst case scenario is you gain an appreciation for the craft. Just on your own canvas, please.
Honest question:
Why the hell isn’t that context in art museums?
If you go into a history museum, they don’t just have a bunch of pots with the caption “Pots” and no other context: there’s captions saying who made the pots and what they were used for and what relationship they have with other artifacts in the museum. If you go to a natural science museum, you don’t go look at a bunch of bones with the label “A Dinosaur” and no other context: there’s captions saying what the dinosaur was and where and when it lived and how big it was and why it died out.
So why do art museums just… not have that? I didn’t go to history school or natural science school, but museums meet me at my level. I didn’t go to art school, and art museums don’t even try. I haven’t been to MoMa specifically, but modern art museums are deeply boring and unpleasant for me because I vacillate between “A kid could make that; why is this so special?” and “I have no idea why this is important or special; I must be stupid.” At least in a “regular” art museum, I can look at a painting of flowers and know it’s special because it’s really pretty — but even still, why don’t they add the context?
I mean. They do?
Many art museums have audio tours that go over this stuff, but almost all of them have information about the art featured with the art. Here’s a page from the Scotsdale Museum of Contemporary Art talking about their didactic panels. It is not at all unusual for modern or contemporary art museums to feature explanatory panels or descriptions of the featured works or their creators.
Here’s the MoMA’s biographical information about Barnett Newman and here’s the museum’s extended label for one of the paintings in the video:
The Latin title Vir Heroicus Sublimis can be translated “Man, heroic and sublime.” Newman once asked, “If we are living in a time without a legend that can be called sublime, how can we be creating sublime art?” This painting, his largest at the time, is one response. Newman wanted the viewer to stand close to this work, and he likened the experience to a human encounter: “It’s no different, really, from meeting another person. One has a reaction to the person physically. Also, there’s a metaphysical thing, and if a meeting of people is meaningful, it affects both their lives.”
(The label for “Abraham,” the other Newman painting in the gallery, is pretty great, I think.)
None of this includes technical details like the difficulty of creating a painting that large with minimal brushstrokes or lines that clearly defined, but it is part of a collection called “Planes of Color” in which there are also two Rothkos and which has an explanation of the historical (postwar, post-atomic) context of the paintings and a brief explanation of the philosophical approach of the artists in the gallery. The gallery is set up to invite comparison between the techniques being used without overtly commenting on them - Newman’s pieces are silk-smooth and uniform while Rothko’s paintings are fuzzier and more textured with a different depth of color.
Here’s one of the current installations in the MoMA, and you can see that in the entrance to the room there is a fairly large label with two paragraphs of explanation on the installation and the artist:
Museums also often have videos about various works and installations up online. The LACMA has a good example of a label that gives an explanation for the composition and motivation of a piece and also two videos that go further in depth on the website. One video is a performance by the artist in front of another of his paintings, the other video is of the museum director discussing the painting. 150 Portrait Tone is about the police killing of Philando Castile and uses words from the video of his death, so heads up. It’s heartbreaking.
Obviously people are unlikely to sit down on their phones and watch a video about a painting from the museum’s website, but it is pretty rare for a museum to present art with no context.
Personally I’ve found that contemporary and modern exhibitions go out of their way to provide more context to visitors than traditional art museums - they know the work is less approachable than romantic landscapes or renaissance portraits. The information provided might not be at the level of technical detail or with the story about slashed paintings that are presented in the tiktok video above, but I also think that an art museum isn’t supposed to be quite the same immersive educational experience as a natural history museum (many of which have exhibits explicitly planned to guide visitors through a lesson with videos, interactions, and a timeline).
There are also art museums that have a stronger focus on outreach and education than on simply presenting and exhibiting art. Some people go to art museums to learn about art, some people go to art museums to experience the emotions evoked by art; these are both valid reasons to go to museums, but the things that make the experience enjoyable for one group might make it less enjoyable for the other group. For instance, a video about the technical skill required to create a uniformly painted canvas presented in the gallery might help people learning about art to appreciate a color field painting more; a quiet gallery with few distractions might help people who are there to experience the contrasts between color field paintings and the emotions they evoke. The people who want to learn about art might feel alienated by a quiet gallery with small, non-contrasting labels and the people who are there to experience the art might feel frustrated if the gallery has more visual noise and crowding to explain various works.
Again - some museums are set up to do more education and have more comprehensive information than others, and even within one museum a special exhibit or installation might have more information for visitors than a painting in a side gallery that is part of a permanent collection.
Audio tours are a good way of meeting in the middle on this - for example, here’s the audio from the MoMA on the painting in the TikTok. Here’s an audio recording from the MoMA about another piece, Accumulation No. 1 by Yayoi Kusama, which includes reading from the artist’s diary and biographical information. These kinds of things are *extremely* common in art museums and used to be provided on tape. Here’s the LACMA’s menu of thematic audio tours.
Honestly if you are interested in modern art but have a bad time in modern art museums, I’d recommend seeing if there’s a children’s exhibit in your local modern art museum or if there is a modern art wing in a more general art museum that you could explore locally. The children’s exhibit thing is not a dig at anyone, by the way - those exhibits are approachable, educational, and fun for people of all ages and are a good way to approach a type of art that you are unfamiliar with.
Also, go to museum websites! If you know you’re going to be visiting a museum, check out the website ahead of time to see what’s on display and what information they have about the pieces; if you aren’t planning on going to a specific museum check out various websites and find art that you think is interesting - look at the museum’s info and then search for the artist online and see if you can find some commentary videos or documentaries if you want to.
It can suck to find yourself in a quiet gallery full of a bunch of stuff that looks boring and feel like you can’t ask anyone about anything or speak to anyone and that you just have to rock back on your heels and look at a sculpture made out of trash like it means something, but the museum wants people there and it wants people to enjoy the art, I promise! You can ask people questions and ask if there are guides or extra info and there will usually be something available. And if there isn’t, at least you know it’s not a museum you want to go back to.
Okay, so. I get pointing out that there are museums that do include information about the artwork. I’m wondering about how that’s not necessarily everywhere and how ACCESSIBLE it is. Like, audio tours are a great idea, but it doesn’t help Deaf/HoH people or people with audio processing issues. Having information on a website doesn’t necessarily help if someone can’t access the website while viewing the artwork.
Like, I’m seeing more information presented to the public, I just think it needs (more funding) to be accessible. Also, I don’t think people fully understand the technical aspects of artwork, not until they try it. My parents always dismissed my “scribbles” until they took some art classes and suddenly had a better understanding of what I do. I also had an “I can do that” attitude about abstract art, until I took a couple classes in university, and had to do something similar and realized HOW HARD IT IS.
But back to my main point: there needs to be more art education for the public.
nekobakaz reblogged
Chinese Warrior Armor
She got so mad she wrote song lyrics and edited a video and everything omg
Living.
megainum
WHAT IS THIS AND WHY DO I LOVE IT SO MUCH
this is the video description on youtube: “ I’ve been a server for 5 years. I made a song about the way white girls ask me for boxes. “
nommobile
CAN I GET A BOX?
Always reblog Can I Get A Box
some doodles of my awakened loth-cat "Grem", in the SW5e game I play with @emp-roar, @not-the-tie-youre-looking-for, and others (sorry, forget your tumblrs) Well, the loth-cat and her speculative humanoid form
nekobakaz reblogged
