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Le Comte de Monte Cristo | The Count of Monte Cristo (2024) dir. Matthieu Delaporte & Alexandre de La Patellière

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Abandoned House in Central Georgia

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fully sober in the club googling rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead full play pdf free

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yeah “i can teach you” is kind and gentle and warm and comforting. it’s also hot. right

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the first edition of beatrix potter's 'the tale of peter rabbit' released in panorama format, 1901.

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thinking about the girl who was abused so much by her former caretaker that she turned invisible(!), so moomin-mamma took her in + the moomins treated her with so much love and compassion that she slowly became visible again.

In Tuulikkis copy of “The invisible child”, Tove wrote: “Thank you for making me stop being invisible”

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This is probably my favorite image of all time I first saw it years ago and it has stuck in my head since then. The only vibes I’ll ever need

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When it comes to sex scenes, the rules say things like: Don’t write them at all, and if you do, don’t use these words. Don’t write them silly, porny, dramatic, tragic, pathological, grim, or ridiculous.

My whole practical thesis around the craft of writing a sex scene is this: it is exactly the same as any other scene. Our isolation of sex from other kinds of scenes is not indicative of sex’s difference, but the difference in our relationship to sex. It is our reluctance to name things, the shame we’ve been taught, our fraught compulsion to an act a theatre of types. It is indicative of the lack of imagination that centuries of patriarchy and white supremacy has wrought on us. 

To teach sex scenes is to talk about plot, dialogue, pacing, description and characterisation: all those elements that make a captivating scene. A sex scene should advance the story and occur in a chain of causality that springs from your characters’ choices. It should employ sensory detail that concretises and also speaks symbolically to the deeper content of the story. Or if not, it should service your work of art in whatever ways you want from your scenes.

“Mind Fuck: Writing Better Sex” in Body Work by Melissa Febos

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“Odysseus’ bodily changes are usually of divine instigation. Although he does himself initiate minor instances of disguise, the Homeric depictions tend to emphasize verbal impersonation as his special talent. The hero oversees his oral performances with great finesse, while most often merely attempting to counter or support whatever physical look he finds himself sporting. The figures of Odysseus is thus poised between a passive manipulation of his body by goddesses and his active ability to control discourse by using a flexible verbal style. Although he is repeatedly helped, and occasionally threatened, by the goddesses’ care and maneuvering of his body, he manages to adjust his hexis to suit whatever situation he encounters, no matter how regrettable his physical appearance may be. […] Since, however, Odysseus’ disguises are also the visible manifestations of his versatile, circumspect type, changes to his body parallel changes his agility with the circumspect and strategic response. […] Three times Odysseus is bathed by goddesses (including the semidivine Helen) and undergoes no greater change than that achieved by cleanliness and a new cloak. However, each bath and change of clothes follow upon or precede scenes in which the hero’s body is tested for its vulnerability to physical harm. Helen is the first to bathe and dress Odysseus, as she describes in the tale she tells to the eager Telemachus (Od. 4.235-264). […] The entire episode purports to show off Odysseus’ cleverness and warrior strength: for instance, Helen emphasizes the quality of his disguise and the number of Trojans he kills upon leaving. But it really revolves around the hero’s contact with Helen and the potential danger to his body, once it is stripped and naked in the bath, that she represents. The oath he insists that Helen swear indicates that as with Calypso and Circe, he is aware of his vulnerability to her powers of perspicuity and perhaps even to her sexual appeal. His body has endured self-inflicted blows before entering Troy, and now he faces helpful but subtly threatening contact with a semi-divine female. He is at his most wary while in his hideous outfit; after his bath and in new clothes, he tells all. Helen’s striping of his disguise also effectively removes his typical crafty smile. Now dressed in the clothes that blazon his identity, he has to fight his way out of Troy rather than cloak his passage in verbal imposture and physical disguise. Thus, at least as Helen tells it, Odysseus divests himself of his physical slyness in her presence and dons the brave visibility typical of Homeric heroes.”

— Nancy Baker Worman, The Cast of Character: Style in Greek Literature

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holy hell aragorn chill out

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I enjoy a joke about fucked up German fairy tales as much as the next nerd, but it's genuinely striking how often the source for the really fucked up stuff turns out to be "yeah, this is only in the Brothers Grimm version and doesn't appear in any extant oral tradition, and we're like 80% sure they added it themselves". To a large extent it's not German fairy tales that are fucked up, it's two specific German dudes.