Virtus, Ultio Et Fatum

Virtue, Vengeance And Fate
  • 16 May 2023
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    80867

    amuseoffyre:

    outercorner:

    valarhalla:

    So, Boris Johnson wrote an essay in which he talked about the Sistine Chapel and then said : “There is nothing like it in Muslim art of that or any age, not just because it is beyond the technical accomplishment of Islamic art, but because it is so theologically offensive to Islam.”

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    BITCH

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    NOT TO MENTION the fact that the prohibition against direct images in Islam was actually the reason for the development of the incredible advances in higher mathematics of the Islamic Golden Age because they were required to create these structures. The Islamic World basically took the ban on images as a “hold my beer” thing and created an entire artistic culture based on mathematics and architecture where art and science fed into and glorified each other, 700 years before the Italian Renaissance.

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    In conclusion

    i will say that islamic art drove me nuts as a kid because i did not have the math knowledge or capability to create such geometric patterns. it may have been the art of my people but by gOD it was difficult and unnecessarily difficult. however my pride in islamic art is neverending. it was frowned upon to be vain in the house, so artists would deck out the places of worship - but places of worship couldn’t be too garishly decorated, or it might detract from worship! the compromise? calm blues and greens, intricate details hidden into the complex patterns. carefully mapped out and planned patterns that were beyond complex and straight into deliberately confusing and practically impossible to replicate. not only that, but verses from the Quran were hidden along the walls, asking god for blessings and care.

    muslim art is stunning and i’ll fight the bitch that says otherwise.

    Also something underappreciated about the Islamic art is that not only is it geometrically incredible, but the geometry and structure of it has a purpose. In the niches and ceilings, the cascading ornamentation is used for acoustic purposes. In many of the mosques, they are so well laid out and designed that a single person standing on a specific spot can speak/sing/pray and be heard in every single part of the building.

    (via spongebobssquarepants)

  • 16 May 2023
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    113

    themakeupbrush:

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    Binibining Pilipinas 2023 Regional Costume Contest Part ¼

  • 15 May 2023
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    170686

    taraljc:

    lemonsharks:

    pictureamoebae:

    i love this so much

    @taraljc

    It’s the smile as she looks straight into the camera that breaks me

    (via taraljc)

  • 15 May 2023
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    8296

    fittingoutjane:

    enkiduofvideogames:

    nicodiangeloisliterallymefr:

    spitblaze:

    ‘the human body is perfect god doesnt make mistakes’ what about wisdom teeth then. huh. gonna let those bastards grow in and fuck up your jaw for god. didnt think so

    also the exploding appendix

    there’s an entire book about all the ways the human body is fucked up, but the highlights I remember are:

    -The blood vessels for our rods and cones in our eyes don’t run behind them but rather in front of them. It’s like putting the power cables *over* a camera’s lens

    -the nasal sinus cavities fucked up during evolution. when our skulls shortened, we went from having a straight shot from one end to the other to having basically a basin which can collect mucus, which then has the actual exit for the chamber at the top of it. this normally isn’t a problem bc cillia can work viscous mucus up it, but when we get sick and produce super watery mucus, it no longer works, which is why our noses get stuffed up.

    the book is called Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes. I recommend it.

    Most mammals can’t get scurvy. They make their own Vitamin C. But in primates, the gene to make it is broken. Normally, when an important gene breaks, the organism dies and has no surviving descendants, but when it broke a few million years ago, our ancestors were living in a lush climate with lots of fruit and survived the failure just fine.

    Then humans invented fire and clothing, and moved to colder climates where fresh food was only available part of the year, and scurvy was born.

    And our reproduction, oh heavens. There are SO MANY WAYS that human reproduction is fucked up that simply DO NOT APPLY to other animals, even the our nearest relatives, the great apes. When a gorilla is giving birth, she finds a nice hiding place in the trees, squats down for like half an hour, and pushes out a baby. Humans, not so much. In fact, the outcomes of unassisted childbirth in humans are so poor that most anthropologists agree that we must have invented midwifery in some form before we became fully human.

    (via robotdragonfanatic)

  • 13 May 2023
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  • 12 May 2023
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    96114

    rhys-ravenfeather:

    enigmaticpink:

    Modern fandom went awry when people stopped learning how to avoid content that upsets them and instead starting actively seeking it out.

    I mean this in the kindest, most loving way possible, but babes you’ll be so much happy when you stop focusing on what other people are doing and instead focus on what you like.

    You’ll never be able to stop people from liking what you hate, and the best way you’ll find any peace of mind is properly utilizing blocking, blacklisting, and muting tools. Take it from someone who used to run a shipping discourse blog, fandom is supposed to be what you enjoy, stop focusing on things that upset you.

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    (via shatterdomerockstar)

  • 12 May 2023
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    30885

    rivertalesien:

    telomeke:

    ID text–

    Post by “Mike I Guess” @‌mike_i_guess:

    The lack of boomer LGBTQ+ people isn’t because it’s “more popular now.” Many were murdered by their peers, died from government inaction during the AIDS crisis, committed suicide due to lack of social supports, or have had to live in the closet due to their peers’ cruelty.
    Photo of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, showing most of the members in black suits with their backs turned to the camera: they represent those lost to AIDS. A handful are dressed in white, facing the camera.

    “The men in white are the surviving members of the Original San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir. Those in black represent the members lost to AIDs. Remember this when people say the gay community survived the epidemic. We had to start over because we lost a whole generation.” (original post)

    (via dianaprinceownsmyass)

  • 11 May 2023
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    535

    junkfoodcinemas:

    The Meg 2: The Trench (2023) dir. Ben Wheatley

    (via spongebobssquarepants)

  • 11 May 2023
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    34781

    deanwasalwaysbi:

    deanwasalwaysbi:

    I know the 90s are back, but stores are starting to market clothes with “O-rings” again and I’m laughing because I don’t know how many people wearing them know what the fuck they are.

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    Bringing back memories of cock ring Ken. Screaming. (x)

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    (via dianaprinceownsmyass)

  • 09 May 2023
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    1585

    fashion-runways:

    NEON COWBOYS Collection 2023
    if you want to support this blog consider donating to:
    ko-fi.com/fashionrunways

  • 09 May 2023
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    39437

    cesperanza:

    olderthannetfic:

    scififantasystuff:

    thebibliosphere:

    elfwreck:

    olderthannetfic:

    kimberlyeab:

    athingofvikings:

    olderthannetfic:

    lanninglurksnomore:

    olderthannetfic:

    *cackling*

    If OTW weren’t around, this wouldn’t be “scaremongering”: It would be the inescapable status quo.

    The people who believe this crap are the anti-vaxxers of fandom.

    Oh god. They kind of are, aren’t they?

    I’d go bigger and just say that they’re the conservatives/reactionaries of fandom–or, to frame it differently, this is how conservative and authoritarian ideologies express themselves in the context of Fandom.

    my opinion on AO3 is that it’s an important asset but i still find it scummy that they’ll ask for money but when their users try to ask for money they slam them with their non-monetization rules.

    Like Anne Rice is dead and this isn’t the 90s anymore, people are making money from fandom please catch up with the times.

    I think you’ve misunderstood:

    AO3 was built by a bunch of us with our free donated labor for the purpose of being a space free from commercial spam.

    It’s not a public service. It was built by us to house the type of fandom culture we liked.

    People who want to do fandom differently, including making money, are welcome to go build their own site with their own money or their own donated labor.

    AO3 does not forbid commercial links because they think fans making money from fanworks is immoral but them making money (to run the damn site) is fine.

    AO3 forbids commercial links because they are making a very specific claim about the legality of fanworks, and that claim is about noncommercial fanworks.

    They’re not saying that commercialized fanworks are against the law. They’re just not prepared to host them–nor defend them in court.

    In case people missed it: The OTW will not honor DMCA takedown orders that are basically, “I own X work and that’s a fanfic of it, and that’s copyright infringement so make it go away.”

    The OTW says, lolnope, we don’t think that’s copyright infringement. If you disagree, sue us.

    The OTW says: Disney - we will not remove explicit Mandalorian fanfic. Rowling, Warner Bros - we will not remove trans Harry Potter fanfic. Gabaldon - we are not removing Outlander fanfic no matter how much you think it’s illegal or a personal violation. Yarbro, if someone puts “The Adventure of the Gentleman in Black” on AO3, you will need to actually take it to trial to (try to) get it removed; none of this C&D order followed by fans caving because they can’t afford a lawyer.

    …So far, nobody has sued them. (This is, in my mind, the strongest proof we have that fanfic is not copyright infringement. In 13 years, not a single person or company has scrounged up a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against AO3/the OTW for hosting fanworks.)

    But they’re not willing to put themselves on the line for commercial works. Those get considered differently in copyright law. They’re not always infringing - there’s a whole history of parody books & songs to prove that - but the OTW is not dealing with them.

    The OTW does not care if fans are making money. The OTW cares if fans making money interfere with its legal defense of its archive.

    If you are not a copyright lawyer, your opinion about the situation is not going to be considered.

    Also, it wasn’t just Anne Rice coming after fandom in the 90s as though this is some relic holdover terror from ancient history.

    Events like Strikethrough and Boldthrough happened in the early to mid-2000s. It felt like you’d wake up every day in 2007 and find another fandom group on LJ gone. (And not just fandom groups either, important community groups for education and trauma survival were also wiped out in those purges as well.)

    And while not exactly the same, Yahoo Groups–and yes Yahoo Groups was a major online fandom hub at one point–were deleted as late as 2019 with very little warning, leaving a lot of older fandom groups scrambling to back up decades worth of content.

    I might be projecting, but Fanfic.net seems to be wobbling too. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they go under in the next few years despite performing similar purges of adult content in 2012 and allowing for obnoxious ads, which made the site unusable on mobile unless you wanted to see an ad what felt like every couple of paragraphs. (It might be better now, I haven’t checked in a while.)

    It has only been in very recent memory that fandom has gained any sort of foothold that isn’t poised directly over a precarious faultline that could at any moment open up and swallow entire communities whole, and a huge part of that is the volunteers at Ao3 who decided to play chicken with the likes of Anne Rice and won.

    Ao3 at its core was and is built by fandom. Some people don’t like it and that’s fine, but to even suggest that the volunteers are lounging around eating peeled grapes and lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills making bank through fraud while fanfic authors are left out in the cold is beyond the scope of laughable.

    They ask for all of that money for two reasons, one being larger than the other.

    1. Employee expenses. Someone has to renew the page license, update firewalls, improve the webpage, and add beneficial features that the users are explicitly asking for. They also keep good copyright lawyers on retainer, who stay up-to-date on potential law suits and draw up legal responses to those Cease and Desist letter. That is not a nothing-expense. People deserve to be properly compensated for their labor.

    2. This is the big one: Servers. I don’t know if y’all know this, but internet web pages do not have endless and infinite storage capacity. Since AO3 is ad free, it needs to come up with the money to buy and maintain servers from elsewhere, aka DONATIONS, which are willingly given.

    It’s not a subscription service. Authors don’t have to pay to submit stories. There’s nothing predatory about it. If you don’t want to give, don’t give. But also don’t try and smear their name when you don’t understand a single thing about what they do for fandom and fanworks.

    People do deserve to be properly compensated, but that’s not how AO3 runs. Almost all of the labor is donated, including those expensive tech skills and legal skills.

    My biggest beef with the “I deserve a $5 coffee for my fic” thing is that the vital work of making the site exist at all is largely uncompensated. A given fic writer wouldn’t just be monetizing their own labor but that of a lot of other people who did not consent.

    Yeah, I don’t think people realize–or can comprehend (!!)–that nobody gets paid–it’s all volunteer from the board on down, and even the lawyers work pro-bono. Server costs, machines, hosting for webpages for related activities, communications software, those things cost money, but the OTW is an all-volunteer nonprofit corporation. We did (I believe) once or twice hired limited-term contractors to help wit specific technical debt stuff (things about gems and stuff underlying the software, updating Rails), but the thing is mostly a giant labor of love. Because it turns out that not everyone creates awesome things  for money. As you might think an entire archive of awesome, custom-written fanfiction might prove. :D  Or to put it another way–the whole of OTW and AO3 is A FANWORK, YOU GUYS. 

    (via robotdragonfanatic)

  • 09 May 2023
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    3282
  • 08 May 2023
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    262773

    thefloatingstone:

    cartoonnetworkhistory:

    cartoon network commercial from 2004

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    lol so anyway it’s basically canon. Johnny and Jack said so.

    (via spongebobssquarepants)

  • 08 May 2023
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    11686
  • 08 May 2023
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    41546

    noxelementalist:

    historicallytired:

    depsidase:

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    I don’t think we give medieval Muslims enough credit. Like medieval math was a categorical mess with the majority of it containing random bases with damn near no theory or cohesive understanding of what it is outside of “I have this much grain and that can, theoretically, be worth this much which is marginally more than what I have right now I think?” 

    These dudes loved Allah so much that they essentially invented math just so that they could continue to worship and pray - that’s honestly one of the most beautiful act of worship and devotion in history and I don’t think it’s given nearly enough credit. 

    Also, they made a specialty compass:

    like, sure, they invented a ton of math in the process, but also, they hacked the earth’s magnetic field to locate Mecca. Let’s revel in that over-achievement for a bit.

    (via dianaprinceownsmyass)