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CQL Wangxian watercolor studies!

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Art Nouveau revival-style custom bathroom sink & mirror design by glass artist Lyn Hovey & woodworker Jamie Robertson (1980s)

Scanned from the book, 'Contemporary Crafts for the Home' (1990)

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#i would like to lick that sandwich

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Nothing is comparable to a human soul when you can get near it, when you break through the shell of conventionalities and reserve, and reach the soul. Marble and canvas and metal are uninteresting in comparison, and God's dealings with souls are so wonderful, and there is much to be done with a soul, once you can establish any intimacy. Think how your own life has grown to its present fulness, the words, the thoughts, the examples which one time or another have influenced you strongly. […] I own I have never had to do with a soul which did not interest me deeply. God's hand I see in each, in the wondrous capacity for goodness; and then the romances of spirits, of guilt, of conversion, of holiness.

George Porter, S.J., the future Archbishop of Bombay, in a letter dated August 13th, 1882. Bolded emphases added.

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I’m tired of hearing people say “Disney’s Cinderella is sanitized. In the original tale, the stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to make the slipper fit and get their eyes pecked out by birds in the end.”

I understand this mistake. I’m sure a lot of people buy copies of the complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, see their tale of Aschenputtel translated as “Cinderella”, and assume what they’re reading is the “original” version of the tale. Or else they see Into the Woods and make the same assumption, because Sondheim and Lapine chose to base their Cinderella plot line on the Grimms’ Aschenputtel instead of on the more familiar version. It’s an understandable mistake. But I’m still tired of seeing it.

The Brothers Grimm didn’t originate the story of Cinderella. Their version, where there is no fairy godmother, the heroine gets her elegant clothes from a tree on her mother’s grave, and where yes, the stepsisters do cut off parts of their feet and get their eyes pecked out in the end, is not the “original.” Nor did Disney create the familiar version with the fairy godmother, the pumpkin coach, and the lack of any foot-cutting or eye-pecking.

If you really want the “original” version of the story, you’d have to go back to the 1st century Greco-Egyptian legend of Rhodopis. That tale is just this: “A Greek courtesan is bathing one day, when an eagle snatches up her sandal and carries it to the Pharaoh of Egypt. The Pharaoh searches for the owner of the sandal, finds her and makes her his queen.”

Or, if you want the first version of the entire plot, with a stepdaughter reduced to servitude by her stepmother, a special event that she’s forbidden to attend, fine clothes and shoes given to her by magic so she can attend, and her royal future husband finding her shoe after she loses it while running away, then it’s the Chinese tale of Ye Xian you’re looking for. In that version, she gets her clothes from the bones of a fish that was her only friend until her stepmother caught it and ate it.

But if you want the Cinderella story that Disney’s film was directly based on, then the version you want is the version by the French author Charles Perrault. His Cendrillon is the Cinderella story that became the best known in the Western world. His version features the fairy godmother, the pumpkin turned into a coach, mice into horses, etc, and no blood or grisly punishments for anyone. It was published in 1697. The Brothers Grimm’s Aschenputtel, with the tree on the grave, the foot-cutting, etc. was first published in 1812.

The Grimms’ grisly-edged version might feel older and more primitive while Perrault’s pretty version feels like a sanitized retelling, but such isn’t the case. They’re just two different countries’ variations on the tale, French and German, and Perrault’s is older. Nor is the Disney film sanitized. It’s based on Perrault.

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silly video trend with hualian (i just wanted to swap their outfits)

if you didn’t know who they were, do you think it’d actually be difficult 🤔

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Art by Serena Malyon

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A snake story, based on an experience I had while I was in Florida.

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Follower Recs

~*~

Where LWJ and Wen Xu formed a soul bond. This fic make tears up. From LWJ POV. This is an off-shoot of nirejseki's 'Resonant Bonds' - Anon

🔒 Dissonant Bonds

by staringatstars

T, 2k, Wangxian

Summary: There were a million reasons why Lan Wangji did not desire a resonant bond. After his own bond was formed, there were a million more.

~*~

(Please REBLOG as a signal boost for this hard-working author if you like – or think others might like – this story.)

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"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

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I'm trying to prove a point to my brain: Reblog if you think fanfiction does not need sex to be good.

There is a trend I’ve noticed that smut fics tend to be much more popular than anything else and honestly I just want to have something to look at to remind myself and that writing doesn’t have to have sex to be worth putting out into the community.

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making my own post bc i dont want to start a fight but anyway. I don't like to feel lonely. I want to be friendly with everyone, to be comforting and fun and easy to become friends with, but I'm not nearly good enough at socializing to give that impression. For all my life, I've been more likely to push people away when I try to be friendly, because I just can't seem to understand or use the metatextual layer of communication most people rely on and expect from others. By now I maintain a respectful distance from everyone at all times, never initiate social engagements, and often slip into downright avoidant behavior. It's clearly a behavior pattern that makes life lonelier, but I find myself stuck in it for fear that stepping out of line will make the people who called themselves my friends, who I cherish and don't want to lose, suddenly turn their feelings around entirely and drive me out of their lives.

So basically: in this post OP is presenting as an uncontroversial fact that there's a particular type of autistic person marked by the type of communication difficulties I have and distinct from the type that belongs on this site. Further, they show no hesitation and expect understanding when they say they can't stand my type, but they have no qualms with making us feel welcome for a time via overt signals like allowing our presence in a private social space, even as the covert signals we can't catch make it clear to everyone else that we aren't welcome. They do this while wishing they could just get rid of us, but wait for an opportunity that wont make them seem mean, just to appear kinder than they really want to be to the people they actually care about. In other words, they've casually confirmed exactly what I fear. You can probably see why I wound up with a complex!

TBH, this is the kind of thing that makes me want to put the word 'autistic' in a box on the high shelf. The first meaning of 'autistic' presented here is marked entirely by symbols while the second marked mostly by behavior and ways of knowing. Anyone left of the republicans nowadays probably feels (sincerely) that we all ought to be kind to autistic people, but the basis of that belief (which won't be immediately obvious to anyone who learned it as a maxim) is that people who are difficult to communicate with deserve dignity and community like anyone else. When one can be understood as 'autistic' by performing all the correct social cues to mark oneself as part of the autistic subculture, they can form an idea of what an autistic person looks and acts like (that is, ironically, inaccessible to someone who can not navigate the dance of social cues effectively and thus doesn't accept that particular toys and memes and interests could be more autistic than others). Then, one can understand themself as kind to autistic people because they are kind to marked subculture members whom they have no trouble getting along with, while disposing of anyone who's the kind of autistic that isn't so easy to get along with, all while avoiding any cognitive dissonance. This isn't a hypothetical, this is a cruelty that I have experienced from groups who understood themselves as entirely autistic or autistic-friendly, and didn't see any irony in making me a pariah and dumping vitriolic words all over me because I "should have known better" about an unspoken social rule. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

TL;DR it is so despair-inducing as a laios-type autistic (bad with tone and familiarity and growing-closer-to-others skills) how people will openly announce that they want to excise autistic people like me from the social fabric the second they get a socially acceptable chance to do so, without even realizing they're being anti-autistic.

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The Shade Of Old Trees by Kryal In which WWX was ice'd for hundreds of years and wakes up in modern times.

i binge read this my whole day off and needless to say the worldbuilding got me on a chokehold 😩💖

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If they made him stay, he would absolutely make it everyone else's problem in a huge way. Untitled Hua Cheng game. It is a heavenly day, and you are a deeply resentful unwilling god.

The idea of Hua Cheng ascending and getting stuck in heaven because they just don’t let him leave for some reason is so fucking funny to me sisndkdj

He hates being there and everyone else also hates him, so much so that they are willing to throw him down themselves if they are forced to stay even more of a second near him.

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I don’t think Xie Lian ever really got the chance to feel human. When he was born he was the center of the world, and since he was young he wanted to be a god. There was nothing he couldn’t do and nobody who didn’t love him, he had massive privilege and he knew it, and at the time, he really genuinely thought he was omnipotent. His mind skipped mortality and went straight to expecting godhood. But even when this period of his life is over, what comes next is isolation. Now, he’s someone without heavenly appeal but with knowledge and experiences much beyond the understanding of mortals. He lives among them, takes the same jobs, eats the same food, has the same needs, he can try to help them, he can try to love them as he always has, but there’s still something that’s just not quite the same. He may understand their plight after living through poverty, but he’s never truly been the common person he’s always wished to save. He can’t grow old, he can’t die, nothing can kill him, his existence is something so beyond humanity but still so far from the god he dreamed of being. And so, he berates himself whenever he has strong emotions or slips up a little or says something kind of weird or misses little details, becuase he still sees himself as not quite human enough to make those kinds of completely normal mistakes. He pushes people away before he has the chance to hurt them, before they have the chance to learn to hate him. So when Hua Cheng finally comes into the picture, he’s trying to say it’s okay to be human, Xie Lian. It’s okay to want to save yourself too.

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Push and Pull Isometrics "omg pls hold me" - your muscles, probably

Just delving more into isometrics! I didn't invent this nor is it necessarily obscure. It doesn't have to replace your regular training. It probably shouldn't, actually. It's just another tool in our toolbox we can use!

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JUST LET ME BE.