#and I know y’all are

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

#shut up e #long post #Saturday thoughts #this has been in my drafts for a week haha #also this is the heart of why AI art feels so wrong #forget the discussion of copyright and theft etc - even if models were only trained on public domain they would still feel very wrong #because they’re not art. art is the labor of creation #even commercial art and art commissioned by the popes and kings of history: there is humanity in the labor of it #unrelated: I did not know living in the Bronx was now something to brag about. How the fuck do y’all New Yorkers afford this city???

[cqcophobiq]

alright listen spiderverse fandom. love hobie’s design, but why’s he’s always in his work outfit in group art or fics even when the others are in casual clothes? punk fashion is so cool. look!! look at the things he’d be wearing when he’s clocked out

#spider punk #across the spiderverse #spiderverse #spiderman #spider man #hobie brown #spiderman across the spiderverse #spider man across the spider verse #spiderverse fanart #astv #astv hobie #look y’all you KNOW he looks cool come on 👀 #and I included mostly black punks for a reason

[sleepy-bebby]

#I know some of y’all have never seen this masterpiece #memes #meme #cute #funny #cute animals #wholesome #funny memes #hamster #twitter #tweets #funny tweets #cuteness #funny tweet #hamster memes #hamster meme #animals #wholesome meme #wholesome memes #you are a lawyer he is a hamster

[disteal]

I hate gay people so much. I haven’t been able to hear an imagine dragons song on the radio or in a shop without my brain just IMMEDIATELY being flooded with ‘Okay im imagining his dragon’. People think i just rly hate imagine dragons with the way my face reacts but i don’t im literally fighting such a personal battle against saying something fruity abt mr dragons out of nowhere because the shit gay people say online is so funny

#vent #drafted in pieces over an hour after hearing radioactive on the aux #dis.txt #y’all are being so ridiculous in the comments #i saw someone say ‘you’d really go for a man with thin ankles? no thanks.’ #there’s like a dozen men who look like this on the front page of seancody #like i KNOW you femcel ass tumblrinas are not this picky

[bluebeesknees]

They’re being obnoxious at work 💙

#just imagine the collective sighs of the first years in the background lmao #satosugu #gego #satoru gojo #geto suguru #gojo #geto #jjk #jjk fanart #jujutsu kaisen #my art #I needed something sweet y’all more misery next time lolol #I need them so happy they don’t know what to do!! #art #bluebeesart #digital art #art on tumblr

[alaraxia]

needless to say the vibes were in shambles

#felt like I got whiplash #yeah yeah it’s on me for shuffling a multi-hundred song playlist we literally call The Soup #the weird songs add the tecks ture to the soup #never know what you’ll get #anyway I don’t normally post this much so if y’all are expecting this forever then lol lmao even #mini me #digital art

[le-poofe]

Carnival AU bc I loVE THEM YOUR HONOR!! (Carnival AU by @sm-baby )

And have some bonus sillies

#the amazing digital circus #tadc fanart #tadc pomni #tadc caine #pomni x caine #caine x pomni #tadc showtime #tadc carnival au #long post #something y’all gotta know about me- I will never pass up an opportunity to use aerial silks in a drawing

[cordycepspog]

Laura Bailey, the voice of Abby in TLoU2, posing over the dead doctor is peak comedy everybody else go home

#edit: y’all i KNOW who the doctor is i just don’t want to SPOIL IT for people #it’s a iykyk situation #have i mentioned that i adore laura bailey? #because i adore laura bailey #tlou hbo #tlou #tlou spoilers #the last of us #laura bailey #joel miller #ellie williams #abby anderson

[agir1ukn0w]

excuse me was anyone gonna warn me about how goddamn ✨PRETTY✨ this young man is or…..

#i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again #men👏in👏eyeliner👏 #🥵 #iñaki godoy #inaki godoy #inaki luffy #one piece #one piece netflix #one piece live action #op live action #op #opla cast #opla #one piece luffy #op luffy #monkey d. luffy #straw hat luffy #luffy #🔥😅🔥 #i say ‘pretty’ but y’all know what i mean😏

[latte125]

aang: zuko won’t trace it back to us

sokka: are you being serious right now? zuko traces everything back to us. he traces things we haven’t even done back to us

#avatar the last airbender #aang #avatar aang #sokka #atla #zuko #prince zuko #incorrect avatar the last airbender quotes #source: tumblr #zukka #not actually #I just want y’all to know I ship them #the gaang

[the-cat-and-the-birdie]

It JUST occurred to me that if Hobie left Gwen the watch in her universe that means he went there and met her dad

The implications of this are SO interesting

Hobie had to go there, find Gwen’s dad, explain who he is and how he knows Gwen, then ask him to give her the watch

He even describes Hobie as a piece of work!!

I’m so curious -

Did Hobie have some choice words with Gwen’s dad? Did he say that he’s the person that housed her when she was homeless?

Hobie met Gwen’s cop dad and gave him the watch WHAT DID HE SAY WHAT WAS THAT CONVERSATION

WHAT DID HOBIE SAY TO GWENS COP DAD

#The implications of this #DOES GWENS DAD KNOW WHAT BLUE LACES MEAN #TELL ME YOUR THOUGHTS Y’ALL #IM SO INVESTED #I CAN’T BELIEVE I DIDN’T THINK OF THIS BEFORE #Gwen Stacy #Hobie Brown #spidergwen #spider gwen #spiderpunk #spider punk #spiderman #spider man #atsv #Across the spiderverse

[peggy-sue-reads-a-book]

Reblog to make the tummy not hurt of the person you reblogged from.

#tummy problems #I know for a fact the rest of y’all’s stomaches hurt too #reblog game

[neo--queen--serenity]

TMAGP 8: A Summary

#WE’RE SO BACK WE’RE SO FUCKING BACK #the magnus archives #the magnus protocol #tmagp #tma #tmagp spoilers #the magnus protocol spoilers #tmagp 8 #running on empty #gerard keay #gerry keay #gertrude robinson #georgie barker #samama khalid #neo queen serenity’s memes #y’all ALREADY KNOW i be getting the early release of the episodes on tuesdays. it took so much willpower not to say anything

[transmascissues]

it’s so funny to me that people used to try to warn me “if you go on t it won’t make you androgynous it’ll just make you look like a man” because 1) i do want to look like a man, that is famously a major part of being a trans man but also 2) t literally has made me androgynous?? like they were wrong on both counts. i got most of the looking-like-a-man changes that i wanted (deep voice, broader body, hair all over my body including my face) and i also give every single cis person in a five mile radius a stroke every time they try to figure out my gender. the assumption that trans men wouldn’t actually want to look like men and the assumption that cis people are good at correctly gendering us once we’re on t are both weird as hell.

#people said this to me all the fucking time pre t #to the point that it did almost make me too afraid to go on t bc ‘what if they’re right and i don’t really want to look like a man?’ #but it turns out that was bullshit on so many levels #i look ‘like a man’ now and love it and also am the most androgynous person most cis people i meet have ever seen #y’all just don’t know how t works at fucking all #transandrophobia #transandromisia #transmisandry #virilmisia #virilphobia #anti transmasculinity #transmascphobia #trans men #transmascs

[will-of-dumpsterfire]

#it’s my mental illness and I’ll do what I want #leon s kennedy #leon kennedy #leon scott kennedy #leon kennedy smut #leon kennedy x reader #resident evil #resident evil x reader #I know where to find my people #y’all are in these tags #oh and this #dead by daylight #dbd leon s kennedy #re death island #re vendetta #re6 #re4r #spotify #spotify wrapped #this was suppose to be a naruto blog but LMAO #here I am

[abilai]

Little red flower for dianxia

#on Instagram this post has music; also cosmic love but SOOO DARKNESS I BECAMEEEE part ya know? #I just think that song is very hualian… #anyway I hope y’all remember that one scene at the end of book 4 because this is it #tgcf #art #mxtx #hualian #xie lian #heaven official's blessing #tian guan ci fu