casthecryptid

[casthecryptid]

[casthecryptid]

There’s something cosmically beautiful about bookbinding fanfiction. Not the bookbinding of fanfiction for monetary gain (which is undoubtedly morally wrong) but rather bookbinding as a gift for someone you love. Or simply bookbinding for the sake of having the story in a tangible form. After all, doesn’t it deserve a place on your bookshelf, too?

But that isn’t the beautiful part. It is this: the melding of something new with something as old as language itself. Fanfiction (at least compared with bookbinding) is a strikingly new phenomenon. Modern fanfiction has only been around for a few generations. Bookbinding, on the other hand? It can be traced back to 2nd century India. It’s a dying art — one that’s been reborn in order to immortalize freely written words.

Even better: the scribes in India who first invented the process of bookbinding used it to create religious texts. In a way, aren’t we doing the same? Fanfiction isn’t a religion, of course, but if you love a story enough to bind it, isn’t that a form of reverence in itself? Isn’t it holy?

Yes. You make it so. The needle and the thread, the newly creased paper, the hardly dried ink … your fingers consecrate it. And as you slip the book onto the shelf, you make it a temple.

And isn’t that just lovely?

[casthecryptid]

Whenever I take a long car ride I end up exhausted afterwards, and I’m always like “why am I so tired? I was just sitting around doing nothing all day.”

But the answer, it turns out, is I was doing something. Riding in a car jars your body in many directions and requires constant microadjustments of your muscles just to stay in place and hold your normal posture. Because you’re inside the car, inside the situation, it’s easy not to notice all the extra work you’re doing just to maintain the status quo.

There’s all sorts of type of work that we think of as “free” that require spending energy: concentrating, making decisions, managing anxiety, maintaining hypervigilance in an unfriendly environment, dealing with stereotype threat, processing a lot of sensory input, repairing skin cells damaged sun exposure, trying to stay warm in a cold room.

The next time you think you’re tired from “nothing”, consider instead that you’re probably in situation where you’re doing a lot of unnoticed extra work just to stay in place.

[casthecryptid]

i’ll get over it i just gotta be dramatic first.

[casthecryptid]

look I'm not gonna pretend I know anything about electronics, but sometimes a plug is so big it blocks another socket, and I'm always like "who the fuck do you think you are"

[casthecryptid]

Why Alien is a classic:

“Not only was Tom Skeritt the obvious “hero” in the movie, but Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley was a character type that was edgy in 1979 (and arguably to this date, though more widely accepted in SF movies than in other genres and in the real world): she was the kind of woman a certain generation might call “mouthy” or a “ball-breaker”. She’s a stickler for rules; she’s disliked, disrespected and disobeyed by her crewmates; she doesn’t scream or cower (nothing against Veronica Cartwright’s Lambert; just that there’s a reason there’s a horror film archetype called the “scream queen”). To be fair, even if Ripley had been cast with a male, the anal-retentive guy is supposed to get it in the last reel of a horror film, having proven he’s not really such a huge asshole after all.

Ripley, a brash and (by the standards of the era) unwomanly woman prevails. Without compromising. And the brave, bearded manly-man? Turns out to be a likeable but incompetent dweeb who gets his halfway through the film. Younger audiences just don’t get how groundbreaking that was when Alien came out. The movie defied convention, broke not just the rules but social mores that were still popular, and created archetypes that people take for granted these days.

And that’s why it’s a classic. People seem to think it’s the brilliant art design or something. No. It’s because it’s a rebel movie.“

(70s Sci-Fi Art’s editorial note: the brilliant art design totally helped) 

[casthecryptid]

frog figurines by CreationsbyChrisNoel

[casthecryptid]

The First Fall

Happy fall! I drew this in honor of the fall equinox (and Persephone returning to the Underworld).  Hit the read more for the rest!

(Warning for lots of images, and I mean a lot. I deeply apologize to people browsing on the mobile app since read mores don’t seem to work on it. I’m so so so sorry. Unfortunately there’s no other way to put this many images in a post :/)

Keep reading

[casthecryptid]

Bringer of Spring

It’s the First Day of Spring, and Persephone is preparing to depart for the upper world.  A century may have passed since she made the famous compromise, but saying farewell is still far from easy.

Bringer of Spring is a collaboration between me and my lovely friend kata-chthonia, awesome writer and author of Receiver of Many.  It’s been three months in the making, so I’m very excited to finally show it to everyone.  Please click the “Read More” to see the rest, and I hope you enjoy! :)

(Apologies in advance to mobile users. There are lots of images!)

Edit 8/5/14: Finally posted the art that was originally planned as the ‘cover’ for the comic. :)  Check it out!

Keep reading

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[casthecryptid]

harlem by Langston Hughes

[casthecryptid]

Poem by Langston Hughes

[casthecryptid]

Langston Hughes, from "Tired", The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: 1921-1940

[casthecryptid]

too many stories about turning yourself into a monster as a metaphor for pretending to be something you aren't and losing yourself in the process. not enough stories about turning yourself into a monster as a metaphor for choosing to openly embrace yourself even if it's strange to other people

[casthecryptid]

started as a shopping doodle oops

[casthecryptid]

Maybe if he was a little less fuckable we wouldn’t be in this mess