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Helena Barquilla @ Christian Dior Haute Couture Fall/Wint 1993

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“I guess I’m talking about it because it happened. Which is the tricky flip side of Sontag’s critique [Illness as Metaphor]. We may have turned the wounded woman into a kind of goddess, romanticized her illness and idealized her suffering, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t happen. Women still have wounds: broken hearts and broken bones and broken lungs. How do we talk about these wounds without glamorizing them? Without corroborating an old mythos that turns female trauma into celestial constellations worthy of worship—thy ravish’d hair / Which adds new glory to the shining sphere—and rubbernecks to peer at every lady breakdown? Lady Breakdown: a flavor of aristocracy, a gaunt figure lurking lovely in the shadows.”

—Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams

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I humbly suggest that true crime freaks should get into learning about scammers instead of serial killers. I LOVE reading about fraud and grifts and pyramid schemes. true crime ppl have all this paranoid energy about murder, which is rare in the grand scheme of things.....maybe instead that could be channeled into some productive rage toward capitalism.

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im so fucked up. theres a scene in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (the sequel to hitchhikers guide) where zaphod is rummaging through the ruins of a long-destroyed city on a lifeless, abandoned planet, looking for a way off, and he stumbles upon the crumbling remains of a spaceport, and miraculously one of the crafts is still intact, and there's still a quiet hum of power going into it from a connected cable, and it's making a quiet noise. so he rigs up a makeshift stethoscope and listens, and there's a PA system saying something like "we are very sorry for the delay. we are currently waiting for a restocking on lemon-soaked towlettes, for your hygienic and culinary pleasure. in the meantime, we will be serving coffee and biscuits on the deck." and he finds the remains of the arrivals/deparetures board, translates the dates and does a little math, and discovers the delay has been 900 years. spooky, yeah? but he goes on the ship, hoping he can get it flying, and it's perfectly well-functioning and an android flight attendant comes out and tries to force him to sit in the seating area, continuing to apologize for the delay. and when he gets to the seating area, every seat has a person in it. long-haired, long-nailed, and completely silent, but very much alive. and another android comes out with a tray of coffee and cookies, and all of the people wake up and start screaming in agony as she gives them their snacks. zaphod is terrified, so he runs to the control deck and locks the door behind him, and he finds the autopilot computer, which repeatedly tells him to return to the seating area, and he eventually convinces it to talk to him. "have you seen the planet?" he says, or something to that general effect. "there's no civilization! you're not GETTING a lemon-soaked napkin shipment!" and the autopilot says "the most likely path to us receiving our shipment is to wait until another civilization develops on the planet and they can deliver it. so we have put the passengers in suspended animation, and we wake them up once a year for coffee." and then? and then zaphod's friend who he was looking for shows up and the plot carries on and they don't say another word about the ship (at least, as far as i know from my place a couple chapters later). thats it. some classic Space Horror Of Grand Proportions, a doctor who plot, a twilight zone plot, an scp article, an asimov short story— that, when a ship ran out of a luxury amenity and didn't get it fulfilled quickly, the autopilot ai decided that, regardless of plentiful fuel and safety, the ideal way to deal with the situation is to suspend the lives of all of the passengers, waking them up once a year, until a new civilization could evolve around them to produce napkins— and it takes up about two pages total before being put aside completely!

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According to Know Your Meme, on August 18th, 2005, Erwin Beekveld brought forth this work into the world. HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD.

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huge fan of the depth of a good purple but another area that draws me is definitely around aquamarine/turquoise/seafoam. you can not go wrong once the green starts getting just a tinge more blue. a gal could certainly do worse than to pull over there and stay a while

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Fantasy November Weekend Challenges

Weekend 3: Fantasy World You’d Live In

I would happily go live in Middle-earth.  Particularly I would like to live in the Shire, in a nice, cozy hobbit-hole.

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The Green Hammock (1905) by John Lavery

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wisdom from my friend’s four-year-old: “reading isn’t just for bedtime. you can read any time of the day.”

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Sir Edward John Poynter

English, 1836-1919

Pea Blossoms, 1890 (detail)

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Yes. This evening I'm reading The Tomb of the Mili Mongga - nonfiction, talks about many different critters. Looking for like a giant rat I think? Haven't gotten that far. And also reading Buried in a Good Book in which toucans and a bobcat have appeared.

Weekly Bookish Question #454 (August 17th - August 23rd, 2025)

Optional bonus for replies: Do you like when book feature animals?

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The Squabble

Two little dragons vie for a place to perch. Nothing else to see here.

I love how this piece turned out!

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Seth Armstrong (American b.1983), Neutra, 2024, Oil on canvas

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the old cistern beneath the flood control system

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the hail mary thing i'm thinking about rn is how i, too, would find it both helpful and infuriating having a huge rock guy around going "how long since last sleep question" whenever I started to fuck things up. Yeah, Rocky, it has been a while since last sleep. Also fuck you. Thanks.