Illustrations from Harry Clarke
September is Bi Visibility month so shoutout to all my bisexual pals out there! I love you, you are amazing 💗
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hey fyi obscenity laws exist and illustration of completely imagined fictional children is still child pornography that is legally treated as child pornography
so i’m doing this writing for graphic novels workshop this semester because it sounded useful and like it might be fun. this might have to go down in history as the biggest mistake i’ve ever made. see, i’m also doing two video game design workshops, and logic would say that the people in the game department would be the worst fucking neckbeard assholes you could possibly hope to interact with, and sure, some of them are fucking irritating. but for the most part they’re decent people and are more likely to argue the merits of linux than, for example, Is It Appropriate To Reimagine A Holocaust Survivor As A Nazi
cis white boys who read comic books are the fucking devil.
but they might not even be the worst. now, see, imagine a white girl, maybe 23. she started an oral presentation about the history of wonder woman a while back with “i’m a feminist, so i’m a little biased”, and, in that same oral presentation, said that we were still in the second wave, in this, the year of our lord 2017. she has read no critical theory. she has read no history. she told a transmisogynistic rape joke two weeks ago. she unironically and uncritically actually likes joss whedon, and she wears that knitted hat from firefly, the orange one, every single fucking day. again, in this, the year of our lord 2017. and she’s writing a graphic novel
it’s called “great nation”, and is a dystopian hunger games/divergent/handmaid’s tale future america……..where sex trafficking exists
a brief interlude. please, take a few breaths, or a quick walk. have a sip of water
anyway, so in this ~*~dystopian regime~*~, there’s a population problem which she seemed to suggest was “there aren’t enough children” but whose plot suggests exactly the opposite. at the birth of a Baby Girl™, the infant is either taken by the government and raised into sex slavery, or, if the baby’s ugly, sterilized. im not sure how this is supposed to solve any issues because lets get fucking real, all babies are ugly
(of course in practice, considering this chick, i’d bet $20 it’s more “disabled, intersex, non-white”, but that’s an uncomfortable eugenics-y theme alongside an equally-if-not-moreso uncomfortable government-operated child sex trafficking rings, given current events in this, the year of our lord 2017. i dont want to think about any of this more than i have to, so i’m gonna make jokes about wrinkly gross newborns instead)
so the 5% (her number) of Baby Girls™ who aren’t sterilized are raised in communal harems or some shit and taught how to be The Perfect Wife, 1950s style. what precisely this entails and why it needs to start when they literally can’t even support their own necks, i can’t imagine. when they hit menarche they’re sold off to the highest bidder and married, and any Boys™ they give birth to are kept in the home, along with the Ugly Girls™.
again, not sure how this is solving an underpopulation problem. it seems like the very worst way to solve an underpopulation problem. but maybe that’s just me
“wow avia!” you might be saying, “thats some really shitty worldbuilding! but what’s the plot?”
well, it’s following one girl through birth and sex slave training and forced marriage and the birth of her first child and then her suicide. naturally.
[firefly hat chick voice] it won’t flinch away from depicting the horrors of her life. i don’t think that’s something you should be able to look away from
that’s child pornography, deborah.
she read the first three pages of her script panel-by-panel and it was already at the child porn level. i had to leave the room, and when i finally came back it was with the comic book legal defense fund’s obscenity faq’s web address written on a piece of paper.
see, you’re not writing prose. there’s a difference between prose and graphic novels, and that difference means that toni morrison can write the bluest eye and it just gets banned from school libraries. you draw child pornography and guess fucking what, you go to jail and spend the rest of your life on a sex offender registry, and that’s completely fucking reasonable! the law doesnt give a shit how Dark And Gritty your graphic novel is, or how fucking literary it is, or whatever. all it cares about (and for that matter, all i care about) is the fact that you are depicting the graphic rape of a literal child, and that’s against the fucking law.
Billy Bogiatzoglou aka Billelis, Illustrations.
Incredible illustration work mixed with 3D rendering by British artist Billy Bogiatzoglou, aka Billelis. I’d really, really love to see these as real-life sculptures and maybe even own a few.
Quotes and Memes from Botanical Illustration Class
- Cooing lovingly over the miniscule cup fungi on a rotting stick.
- “This took me 15 years to figure out. In the ‘Fine Art’ world that would make it a ‘Trade Secret’, but we’re all communists here, so let me show you so you don’t waste your time.”
- *Pencil falls on the floor* *CHORUS OF HORRIFIED GASPS*
- “Do we need calipers for this?”
“Only if you’re a weenie.” - Prismacolor: The Pencil That Smiles Back!
- “Very nice color here! what is that?”
“It’s, uh. Blood.”
“But it’s such a fugitive pigment! How are you going to archive this?” - Eating part of your sample to make the composition more interesting
- “Mervi did you sew this bee’s wings together?”
- Drawing in irregular dimensions just to tell Jenna where she can stick her her 16x20 frames.
- A U B E R G I E N E S
- “How many color pencils do you HAVE?”
“I don’t know. My nephew got bored counting at 8000.” - S E N E S S E N C E
- Orchid People ™
- Mervi Will Notice If You Do It Wrong And Will Be Very Disappointed With You So Do It Right, Jackass
- The McCauleys, getting in trouble in the back row again.
- DO YOUR HAND STRETCHES
- WEAR YOUR GLASSES
- KEEP YOUR COFFEE AND PAINT WATER ON OPPOSITE SIDES
- “If you could invent a new color, what would you call it?”
“Fred.” - “We all know Meredith is a witch and that’s fine, we just want to know the name of the Dark God she sacrifies goats to so we can get in on that.”
- Faber-Castell WHY did you discontinue the Magic Purple?
- “Can’t you write longhand?”
“No. It’s Regan’s fault.” - Snitching samples from around the gardens.
- “This is a beautiful composition. If you mess up the label, I will have you flogged.”
- Small Children randomly wandering into the classroom.
- I Chose This Subject Because It’s Beautiful And Complicated And I’m Regretting That Choice But No Bitchass Leaf Is Going To get The Best Of Me
- “I think the technical term is ‘Fiddly Bits’.”
- “What’s the weirdest thing anyone’s said about your art?”
“A woman once told me I do beautiful photography.”
This thread contains an amazing list of concrete ways to help fight the appalling ways that our immigrants and their children are being treated. Please donate, call, and spread this info!
killerblackberrypie asked:
Wait wait our idea of dirty medieval peasants is based on a *tax aversion scam*??? Please tell me more I need to know this. *bounces excitedly*
brunhiddensmusings answered:
shortly after william the conquerer came to power he initiated something known as ‘the doomsday book’- he sent envoys to survey his new lands to record the properties he now controlled so they could pay accurate taxes. every acre of field, every mill, livestock, buildings and their relative size- all would be recorded to determine the wealth of each settlement so a percentage could be expected as rent. for an example of what this book meant; the previous king was aware of and collected taxes from about 20 grain mills in england, william’s audit shot that number above 200. you dont know the meaning of ‘pedantic’ untill you start reading about medieval grain mills, theres a church that paved its floor with confiscated ‘illegal’ millstones to ensure that the town had to get its flour from the church’s official mill and one war simply about stealing the same millstone back and fourth for quite a few decades
of course word of these envoys traveled faster then they did, virtually every town they came to had time to claim they had far less taxable wealth then they actually did have by the time the audit arrived. in one of the more over the top cases an entire village pretended to have caught insanity- when the taxmen arrived they saw screaming laughing idiots with underwear on their heads so they left as fast as they could considering at the time insanity was thought to be literally contagious. it would be over five years before anyone tried to audit that town again. its safe to assume a large number of other villages also had sudden cases of strange diseases, mysteriously disappearing cows, or very large shrubberies and haybales shaped like buildings and you dont need to look over that hill either. thats not even touching how many small communities just plain didnt technically exist because they were too small, somewhere weird, or in legal limbo of who owned it
of course when the feudal part of feudalism started moving its gears you found that the local lord of that village was unlikely to divulge the exact amount of rents they could collect to THEIR lord either, knowing that the more they admitted to receiving the more they were expected to hand over. this was not exclusive to england either, the more you learn about feudalism the more you have to ask how all these minor lords out in the boonies kept having the money and soldiers to do all the political intrigue bullshit, the answer is also tax evasion. each village kept claiming it had fewer people living in shittier houses with less land and fewer livestock then they actually had, and each local lord kept claiming they were receiving less rents then they actually took so were also adverse to an accurate audit.
their knowledge of tax loopholes also extended to finding out that clergymen were either exempt from tax or received a far lower rate of tax, so proving you qualified as a clergyman was an endeavor that paid dividends. specifically to prove you were clergy you proved that you could read and write enough Latin to satisfy an official, so you could spend some money to hire someone to tutor you enough Latin to fake it. its estimated that due to this fully ten percent of medieval english households wrote ‘clergy’ on their tax forms.
another and even more extreme example was the peasants revolt of 1381, london was swarmed by the unwashed masses from all sides instigated by an official trying to collect (a lot of) unpaid poll taxes, an angry mob driving a teenaged king Richard II to retreat to a boat in the river, and culminating with 1500 peasants being executed by an emergency militia. this doesn’t sound like a huge success untill you dig into some of the details- peasants from a large number of villages all arrived at london at the same time, leaving dedicated forces specifically to stop ships from acessing london to break the siege, the peasants executed a select number of court officials and started burning paperwork- but systematically only burning the ones detailing who owned plots of land, debt records, and a few criminal records. the peasants who besieged london and scared the king into the river had successfully purged a whole lot of debts and reclaimed a lot of land in one very ballsy and highly coordinated move that relied on them being seen as illiterate dirt farmers with no ulterior motives besides pitchfork mob riot and trying to kiss the queen mother while they touch everything in the tower of london with their grimy hands
found it. this is… this is amazing. I did a BA in Medieval British History and we never, ever, once considered this. Not once. At a major Canadian university.
jfc this changes my entire brain
New exhibition trailer!
Over billions of years, living things have evolved from simple cells into an awe-inspiring array of life forms—a spectacle of behaviors, specialized parts, and exacting skills. Some species are familiar. But others are so amazing that they test the limits of our imagination.
Life at the Limits: Stories of Amazing Species opens April 4.
*showers*
*immediately puts the same pajamas back on, but this time with the Good Underwear™*
this MIGHT have something to do with me being gay, but I think women look better in suits than men do
Reblog this if you’re pro-receiving a brown paper package containing one (1) handwritten love letter, a small jar of strawberry jam from the farmers market, and a smattering of pressed flowers.