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Pollancres en la tempesta, per Markus Matthias Krüger; 2011.

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The photo is not very good and I still need to wash and iron it, but I couldn't wait to show my first ever big cross stitch project;

Love how it turned out, especially with the green embroidery thread (cotton thread on linen)

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Porsharenaehall [ P o r s h a H a l l ]

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girl help i can't stop seeing patterns in life and the interconnectedness of everything

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the leaves are falling in the stream, the river flows away

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this is VERY niche but i saw a trc post saying blue is thrifting and gets gansey a shirt that says community dick and my first thought after “that’s hilarious and probably right” was “who in evocation” and correct me if i’m wrong but despite instinct saying it’s david my heart says it’s probably rhys who would be gifted the shirt in that scenario

Anon I fear you understand Rhys McGowan on a deeper level than I, the author, previously thought possible.

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and you must learn to see in darkness. Here you can praise the light, having so little of it:

Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986

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by Elsa Olsson/Fevernest, 2019

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Antti Laitinen

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1850 - 1900 Sylvia S. Queen's "Garden of Eden" Quilt

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I put discourse up on a high shelf for the last five years of my twenties but now that I'm thirty I'm granting myself limited provisional Public Opinion and Personal Essay privileges.

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word on the street is that you have to keep living

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Tony Yaacoub Fall 2013 details

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How do you still interact with dark acadenia despite all its internet shallowness?

It has been strange to see a subculture (in the truest sense of the word, a community bonded through internet and irl groups who share values, interests, artistic inspirations, and style) flattened into a disposable microaesthetic like "clean girl" or "mob wife". I don't know if that's the precise shallowness you're referring to here, but yeah, it's weird so see a "dark academia" category of Shien or what have you. We used to have more substantive dark academia communities, even on the internet, ones that embodied a lifestyle and not just a certain color palette or style of clothing. However, this happens to most subcultures once they become profitable marketing categories, from punk to goth and beyond. In our current capitalist system, especially when we're so atomized from each other and so beholden to lightning-speed social media trends, it's inevitable.

That said, there are a lot of new generation dark academics keeping that subculture alive, and contributing essays and novels to the community, and creating gorgeous photography, and making cooperative art, and rightfully critiquing the subculture's baked-in whiteness and cisheteronormativity and eliteness (I would argue that dark academia has always been queer and always been self-aware of the poisoned cup of elitism, although I was grant you that it's always been troublingly dominated by white artists and influencers). There's been a boom in traditionally published dark academia and dark academia-influenced novels, for example, as that first generation grows older and publishes their own responses to the genre. That also contributes to a more natural evolution of the art form.

And like, if you talk to five different people in the subculture they will define it in different ways, but I still think there are people out there fascinated by the interplay of decadence and ruin, beauty as terror, the highs and lows ambition can lead us to, art of art's sake, and the mindful preservation of history.

However, I also think it's natural that a lot of that original wave of dark academics have moved into other subcultures like vintage fashion or burlesque or generalized aesthete communities, or have graduated from their own academic season of life and moved on to write their own books, or pick up other hobbies and interests. Circle of life!