South Island, New Zealand

magic is everywhere

The mythical fox // Dennis Lehtonen

In Finnish the word for northern lights is ”revontulet” and it directly translates to ”fox fires.” According to the old mythology when it runs along the tundra, the fox’s flaming tail sweeps snowflakes into the sky and the fur scratches the trees, setting the skies on fire. That is how the northern lights are created. 

Originally a Twitter Thread, with the help of Thread Reader

Baldolino Calvino🏳️‍🌈🚩🇧🇷✨♻️🌱

Oct 1 • 15 tweets • 4 min read

Fantasy is not science, nor philosophy, and not real (of course). This may seem obvious, but what I am trying to do is creating an exact, non-contradictory definition of fantasy, not as an art genre, but as an object of study. Not by science, but by fantastic natural history.

Fantasy - Wikipedia

"Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements, typically set in a fictional universe and sometimes inspired by mythology and folklore."

Fantasy, Magic (not meaning prestidigitation), Mythology, and Folklore can be understood as equivalent, overlaping concepts. Wikipedia's entry is mostly tautological, circular, thus.

However, this is an article about the artistic genre, and one could say that it refers to art expression (written, musical, cinematic, other) that uses these references. This is enough for this use case, but we do not advance in an objective conceptualization of fantasy.

Fantasy (psychology) - Wikipedia

"(...) fantasy is a broad range of mental experiences, mediated by the faculty of imagination in the human brain, and marked by an expression of certain desires through vivid mental imagery."

This entry about the concept of fantasy in psychology gives a more elaborared view of it. However, what differentiates fantasy from other instances of human creativjty? The article continues: "Fantasies are associated with scenarios that are absolutely impossible."

Wikipedia's entry on Fantasy (psychology) does not give any reference to this concept, and proceeds listing the importance of Fantasy for various theoretical approaches (Freud, Klein, Lacan), or pathologies (narcissistic personality disorder, schizophrenia). It is not unified.

More revealing is Wikipedia's "History of Fantasy" (about the literary genre).

" (...) the supernatural and the fantastic were an element of literature from its beginning. The modern genre is distinguished from tales and folklore (...)"

It makes a clear distintion between ancient myths and folklore, and so-called "modern fantasy", whose first explicit representant was Scottish author George MacDonald in the late XIX century, with his novels "The Princess and the Goblin" and "Phantastes".

Important precursors were Dickens, Thackeray, Andersen, Ruskin, Morris. And MacDonald's work enormously influenced Tolkien and Lewis. One key word in this historic description of Fantasy is "speculative". And a defining characteristic of modern fantasy is the "fantasy world".

Distinctive differences of modern fantasy are the postulate of a secondary fantasy world apart from reality; fictitious by design; and narratives from a (group of) author(s) with an interpretative aim. Myths or folklore does not have any of these characteristics.

The entry goes on in a detailed description of the development of Fantasy as a literary genre, since writings about tales and legends from Middle Ages. However, one fun example of how medieval mind understood the fantastic can be seen in the novel "Baudolino" by Umberto Eco.

Most of this Wikipedia's entry is based upon https://twitter.com/john_clute and John Grant's https://sf-encyclopedia.com/fe/, published in 1997, and fully available on the internet.

More to come, be patient.

The Squire, Merion

There is no need to dance anymore, I’m told. 

There never was a need to dance in the first place, but it gave us joy, hope, happiness… It gave us a soul. 

And I laugh at the mere thought of stopping.

Prints and Commissions Twitter - deviantART - Insta - Kofi - Mastodon

My new Grass & Field’s brush pack is officially out for Photoshop CC, Procreate, and Clip Studio Paint! 

You can download it from this page (click!)

Like all my brush packs it is free, with tips welcome but optional. You can use these brushes in anything - personal work, freelance work, professional work, commercial work - including things you sell, no license required. Demo videos are linked on the product page. Enjoy!!

Image of the Cosmic Cliffs, a region at the edge of a gigantic, gaseous cavity within NGC 3324, captured by Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam).

Image: NASA

HiPOD: A Layered Feature in a Crater in Nilosyrtis Mensae

The objective of this observation is to examine a layered feature in an impact crater. The layers may represent layers of mantle from when the climate changed and the shape may be due to the wind. The scene is also found in Context Camera data. (Enhanced color cutout is less than 1 km across; black and white is less than 5 km.)

ID: ESP_075257_2155 date: 16 August 2022 altitude: 291 km

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona

X-Men by Chase Conley

Via mindful.brains [Instagram]

this meme but its just horikashi