I’ve Been Making Gay Knights (and Dames) Collages On My Phone At Work

My best friend and I had a call recently—she’s back with her family for a bit helping out with some hometown stuff. As part of the stuff, she’s been going through a (deceased) relative’s scrapbook, compiled in the American Midwest circa 1870-1900 and featuring mostly cut-out figures from the ads of the day.

She talked about how painstaking this relative’s work was. (Apparently the relative was careful to cut out every finger, every cowlick; this was by no means carelessly or hastily assembled.) But she also she talked about how—the baby on the baking soda ad is ugly, it is so ugly, why anyone would clip this heinously ugly illustrated baby and paste it into a scrapbook? Why would you save the (terribly told, boring) ghost story that came with your box of soap?

(Why include these things in the first place? we asked each other. ”There’s a kind of anti-capitalism to it,” she mused.)

And we discussed that for a bit—how most of the images, stories, artists, and ads were local, not national; they’re pulled from [Midwestern state] companies’ advertisements in [Midwestern state] papers, magazines, and products. As a consequence, you’re not looking at Leyendecker or Norman Rockwell illustrations, but Johann Spatz-Smith from down the road, who took a drawing class at college.

(College is the state college, and he came home on weekends and in the summer to help with the farm or earn some money at the plant.)

But it also inspired a really interesting conversation about how—we have access to so much more art, better and more professional art, than any time in history. As my bff said, all you have to do to find a great, technically proficient and lovely representational image of a baby, is to google the right keywords. But for a girl living in rural [Midwestern state] of the late 1800s, it was the baking soda ad, or literal actual babies. There was no in-between, no heading out to the nearby art museum to study oil paintings of mother and child, no studying photographs and film—such new technologies hadn’t diffused to local newspapers and circulars yet, and were far beyond the average person’s means. But cheap, semi-amateur artists? Those were definitely around, scattered between towns and nearby smallish cities.

It was a good conversation, and made me think about a couple things—the weird entitlement that “professional” and expensive art instills in viewers, how it artificially depresses the appetite for messy unprofessional art, including your own; the way that this makes your tastes narrower, less interesting, less open.

By that I mean—maybe the baby isn’t ugly! Maybe you’ve just seen too many photorealistic babies. Maybe you haven’t really stopped to contemplate that your drawing of a baby (however crude, ugly, or limited) is the best drawing of a baby you can make, and the act of drawing that lumpen, ugly baby is more sacred and profoundly human than even looking at a Mary Cassatt painting.

And even if that isn’t the case….there was this girl in [American Midwestern state] for whom it was very, very important that she capture every finger, curl, and bit of shading for that ugly soap ad baby. And some one hundred years later, her great-something-or-other took pains to preserve her work—because how terribly human it is, to seek out all the art we can find that resonates with us, preserve it, adore it.

It might be the most human impulse we have.

good omens bbc radio show

one of my mutuals was looking for a way to listen to all the episodes of the good omens BBC radio show and i still have mp3s of the show from when it first came out, sooo i figured a lot of people may want to listen to it now that we have all become good omens blogs lmao. 

below are links to mp3s of all 6 episodes hosted on google drive. let me know if something’s wrong with any of them!

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

This is a theater stage for a play

Sometimes you just have to doodle those weird thoughts from the shower…

I’ve realised that what I miss about fantasy is it being truly escapist. I miss it depicting places where I would actually want to go.

Every dang kid I knew waited for their Hogwarts acceptance letter. Reading the books and seeing it on screen gave you this warm, fuzzy feeling and a feeling of longing, even when they were in danger and fighting monsters and evil wizards, you want to be there.

You want to go to Middle Earth, see hobbits and elves and dwarves and run through this land of incredible beauty, mysticism and magic.

You want to be in the TARDIS, seeing the universe.

The more recent trend of fantasy is this gritty, dark realism and places where you would just never want to go. I don’t want to go to Westeros. I don’t want to be in The Hunger Games, I don’t particularly want to be in The Witcher universe. I’m living in the world of Black Mirror and I hate it.

Fantasy used to say “hey our world kinda sucks but here’s a cooler one”, but now it says “hey our world kinda sucks, but here’s an even worse one.”

That isn’t to say that the above are bad. They’re not. 

But I miss beautiful, escapist fantasy that gives me a break. That takes me somewhere magical, somewhere otherworldly and gives me messages of hope and optimism in the face of darkness. I really, really miss that.

The Magpie, Claude Monet, 1868-69

Happy birthday, Claude Monet (Nov. 14, 1840 - Dec. 5, 1926).

hello!! just had a silly thought, i wondered, why must I insert Crowley and Aziraphale in every romantic movie I see, when my brain suddenly went because THEY ARE actually HAPPY and IN LOVE and it’s FUN—thousands of au ideas for all the years they have been and will be together, not a bad idea! :)

boy have i got a fic collection for you!!