#Don't Judge a Book by its Cover

[citrineaura]

Wally's Intelligence [Analysis]

With the newest Wally 2.0 plushie, Wally mentions "I wish I could re-experience the joy and merriment of being sold again" because as I said here, he wants to be let in. The more eyes, the easier it is to obtain information. [The commercials may not be associated with the actual storyline, so this is just a little observation on my end]

Wally then slowly turns around to look at us, with a knowing hint in his voice he gives us the makeship website, except- he says "makeship dot com forward slash EYES slash WALLY" I don't know if anyone caught that. But it wasn't a coincidence. It wasn't to the actual website, it was probably another page but we can't hear the rest of what he says because Howdy is talking so DANG LOUD.

A page that doesn't exist because it's not related to the lore, but I just found it funny.

You know, even if this was part of the plot, it would only further highlight Wally's intelligence. He might process things slowly (don't I know it!) but his adaptability skills are top tier! He's able to adapt to new information quickly and within the plot, he demonstrates the ability to control the website, type, and even direct viewers to new sites.

And he uses his eyes to his advantage, to teach himself, to learn beyond his world. He's an opportunist, especially when trying to contact that one special person in the Restoration Team.

Pretty sure the rest of the puppets are aware they're in a show since they sometimes openly communicate with the narrators, and have their own commercials AND Wally and Barnaby specifically even get hosted!

All of this and yet Wally is the only one reaching out and asking the real questions. So who's really smart here?

Wally is actually so intelligent, I could cry. I think it should be a lesson to not underestimate people who are slow in speech or have difficulty understanding/doing simple things (folks with mental health illness as well!) They can and will surprise you!

Wally has quite a lot of potential that I'm sure he knows he has, so all of this underestimating of his character is humorous, really.

[whumpster-dumpster]

When the small, unassuming, most underestimated team member is easily one of the most dangerous when pressed 👀

[skycowboys]

JuFly "Scraggly"

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Discord | Patreon | Art Prints

[sashabunnie]

Hi! I apologize for not posting recently despite having a resurgence in wanting to draw. I've recently gotten a new art program and am still trying to figure out how to use it. In the meantime I'd like to discuss a topic I find important to talk about.

I recently received a question in my inbox. I found it rude and decided to delete and block the person. But now I'm realizing I could use this comment to educate those not in the art field on this subject, specifically about how proportions and different body types are taught to be drawn. I'll paraphrase the comment received:

"It's funny how you're fat but you draw yourself skinny, it's hilarious."

Yup that's the basis of what the comment was. I could tell from this comment that a) they're trying to be rude and mean and b) they at least don't draw humans and at most have no idea how to draw period.

Now you may be asking, how does this comment lead to an educational moment? I'm glad you asked.

I've been drawing since I can remember, and I only took a few art classes in middle school and highschool. Other than that I'm almost completely self taught and often took my inspiration from cartoons.

I also grew up in a much larger body than a good portion of my peers. I had binge e@ting disorder. This was caused by growing up in a poor family. I was taught to eat whatever I was offered(unless it was by a total stranger). I was also taught at school to inhale my food starting from kindergarten as we only got 15 minutes to eat and 15 minutes to play, if we went over the 15 minutes to eat we weren't allowed to play. Anyways this conditioned me to have BED.

Being overweight as a child was torture. Just like any ED it's very hard to control and even harder to spot in a child. I went untreated until I was 19. I'm a lot better now but sadly my stomach is now partially paralyzed.

Now like I said, growing up fat was extremely difficult, seeing others in my life who were skinnier than I, seeing all the cartoon shows on TV with the pretty skinny ladies and bulked up men, or even lanky men. And sure there were fat people in cartoons, but they're often portrayed as these lazy, stupid, people or they're middle aged with greying or thinning hair, in a mobility scooter, who are also portrayed as stupid and lazy.

I never saw a true representation of myself in cartoons. I never saw a plump nine year old with dreams to become a ballerina or baseball player, I never saw a bigger girl who exceeded in every class who wanted to become a paleontologist. All I saw were people making jokes about the fat character, how dumb and lazy they were.

But to me, I was never lazy or stupid. And when I started drawing myself I did so as a beautiful young person who was smart, clever, and always taken seriously. It was my escape from this world of hate.

Then I started taking art classes in middle school and highschool. They taught very basic anatomy in drawing, such as "this is how long your arm should be" and "the hand should be able to cover the face", just teaching proportions. But here's the catch, they hardly taught anything more than an hourglass shaped body for females and a rectangle shape for men.

In fact if we tried to explore more or less body shaped, whether it was a flat chested female, a dad bod male or vice versa, it was met with severe criticism.

Now over the years I've learned how to draw different body shapes and sizes better than I have in the past. And I have worked greatly to improve my self image and that a bit of extra fat here or there won't be the end all be all.

However that's not to say that I still have a hard time drawing myself as big as I see myself irl. The ED that warped from BED to OSFED in my teen years still yells at me from my mirror, telling me how ugly I am for being in a bigger body. People have told me several times that I'm not as big as the mirror says I am, which is true.

I may be in a bigger body but it's not to a point where my weight is affecting my health. The only real thing affecting my health are a slew of genetic disorders that I cannot control.

Just to conclude, just because someone draws themselves as bigger or smaller does not mean that they're delusional. It's just how they draw themselves.

Just be kind and non judgemental. You don't know what that person has been through and honestly it's not really your business unless it's a threat to safety, theirs or others.

And if you don't like what you see, scroll, it's not your place to get upset over something as small as someone drawing themselves in a different light than your perspective.

Love y'all!

(Picture of my gravity falls x the owl house OC for y'all)

[quietb00m]

Djungelskog and konig are the same person. I've never seen them both in the same room

[trygamer45]

I honestly don't get why anyone would like your object head characters. They're all so lame and I don't get why anyone would like them. Do some real fucking art for once instead of some cartoony anime shit.

Ow... Just ow...

[petermorwood]

YA or not YA, that is the question...

This started out as a response to Diane’s post here about YA literature and its long history prior to what some people think inspired it, but got longer (Oh! What a surprise!) and wandered far enough from the initial subject that I decided to post separately.

So here it is.

*****

Many years ago my town library (in Northern Ireland, so following UK library practice, I suppose) had just two sections, Adult and Children. There was no YA section, and the Children’s section covered everything from large-format picture books through to hardback novels and the usual amount of non-fiction.

(Library books were almost always bought in hardback for better wear, and even the softback picture books were rebound with heavy card inserts.)

There were classics like “Treasure Island”,  “Kidnapped”, “King Solomon’s Mines” “Under the Red Robe” and “The Jungle Books”.

There were standalone titles like “The Otterbury Incident”, “The Silver Sword”, “The Sword in the Stone” and “The Stone Cage”.

There were series about characters like William, Biggles, Jennings and his counterpart Molesworth, the Moomins, Narnia and Uncle.

There were authors like Alan Garner, Nicholas Stuart Grey, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Henry Treece, Ronald Welch… And of course there was J.R.R. Tolkien.

The first time I got "The Hobbit", "Farmer Giles of Ham" and "Smith of Wootton Major" they were shelved in the Children's section. This was about 1968-69.

In the early 1970s the library moved to larger premises, which allowed room for Very Young Children (where the picture books now lived) and Children (everything else), still with no YA section, though with more advanced picture books like “Tintin” and “Asterix” * in a sort of no-man’s-land between them.

( * These included editions in the original French, which turned out very useful for making language lessons at school a bit more fun and gaining extra marks in exams through judiciously enhanced vocabulary.)

“The Hobbit” et cetera were still on the Children shelves, but now that the library was larger and more open-plan, volumes of "The Lord of The Rings", normally in the Adult section, occasionally got shelved there as well by well-meaning non-staff people.

I never saw “The Hobbit” mis-shelved alongside “Lord of the Rings” among the Adults, but Farmer Giles” and “Smith” sometimes turned up there, courtesy of those same well-meaning hands.

It’s probably because the first, with its sometimes complex wordplay and mock-heroic plot, reads like a humorous parody of more serious works, while the second, if read in the right frame of mind, can seem quite adult in the style of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s “Kingdoms of Elfin” - which is in fact a good deal more adult than “Smith of Wootton Major”, even if you squint.

*****

This “Hobbit” / “Rings” confusion is a lightweight version of assuming a particular author writes every book for the same age-group. This is very much not the case.

Sometimes the thickness of the book is a giveaway. Compare, for instance, @neil-gaiman’s “American Gods” with “Coraline” or indeed “Fortunately, The Milk”.

Sometimes the cover is a hint, for example the difference between “Live and Let Die” by Ian Fleming...

...and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, also by Ian Fleming...

...although the original James Bond novels are – apart from some extremely dated attitudes – a lot more weaksauce than many YA books nowadays.

(More weaksauce still now that Fleming, like Roald Dahl and Agatha Christie, has been censored to conceal the extent to which - let's call them Certain Attitudes - were a standard feature in British popular fiction. Apparently (I haven't read any Newspeak Bond so can't confirm) the redaction was done in a curiously slapdash way, removing some things while leaving others.

These novels have become, IMO anyway, period pieces as much as Kipling, Doyle, Dickens and Austen, and erasure probably has less to do with sensitivity - maybe with some "brush it under the rug and they'll forget about it" involved - than with keeping them marketable, so Fleming doesn't go the way of other once-bestselling writers like "Sapper" and Sydney Horler.)

It would also be a mistake, despite advisory wizards Tom and Carl, to think that @dduane’s “Young Wizards” books are meant for the same age-group as her “Middle Kingdoms” series – although, once again, the later YW books and all of the MK slot into what a modern YA audience expects from its fiction.

But sometimes there’s absolutely no doubt that This Book by This Author is not meant for the readership of That Book by The Same Author. I’m thinking of one example which caused a certain amount of amusement.

“Bee Hunter” by Robert Nye is a retelling of the Beowulf story for children, though IIRC occasional bloody episodes as Grendel takes Hrothgar’s housecarls apart make it more suited to older children. 

I’d brought home a copy from the library when much younger, and borrowed it again years later in company with another Nye novel, “Falstaff���...

...which was poetic, historic, melancholic, often bawdy, frequently funny and at all times most emphatically NOT for children, as indicated by some of these chapter headings - I draw your attention to XX, XXII, XXXII and especially XL... ;->

Yes. Quite... :->

*****

I was familiar with card index systems from quite early in my life, because my grandfather’s grocer’s shop had a fairly simple one for keeping track of customers, suppliers, stock and so forth, and since the library’s index card system cross-referenced in the same way, I was already home and dry.

If I could remember a title, I'd find the author, and once found I could track down other titles by that author (which, as shown above, can be educational...) Even if I could only remember the subject - historical, adventure, comedy - I'd still have narrowed my search window more than somewhat.

(This from-here-to-there mindset later became virtual train travel by way of the electronic timetables which SBB – Swiss Railways – used to issue on CD, and which let me “travel” anywhere in Europe, complete with a map. Those CDs are long discontinued, but I can still do virtual travel courtesy of the SBB website. Complete with a map…)

This is the last one we got, kept for sentimental reasons and occasional outdated train-travel on an equally outdated XP netbook.

As you do.

Or as I do, anyway. :->

*****

I also knew about title request cards and interlibrary loans, and was a frequent user - never more so than when I started reading “The Lord of the Rings” for the first time.

The town library didn’t have all three volumes, just “The Fellowship of the Ring” and “The Two Towers”, so I checked them out on a Friday to read over the weekend.

You can already see where this is going… :->

I finished “Fellowship” late on Saturday afternoon, went straight into “Towers” and by Sunday evening was all of a twitter (no, not that one) or as my mum would have said, up to high Doh, as I fretted about Not Knowing What Happened Next.

Fortunately school was no more than a brisk bike ride from the library, so I devoted my Monday morning break to zooming down and filling in one of the most urgent title requests I’ve ever made, then spent the rest of the week on tenterhooks, looking in every lunchtime and each afternoon on my way home.

Just In Case.

Some kindly librarian must have pulled strings or stamped the request "Expedite Soonest", because when I went back to school after Thursday lunch, I had “The Return of the King” burning a hole in my saddlebag.

I wanted to start reading it at once, but good sense prevailed; imagine getting caught between chapters at the back of a boring Geography lesson and Having The Book Confiscated…

I didn’t pay much attention in class on Friday, due to being half-asleep after starting “Return” in the evening after prep and finishing it in the wee hours of the morning.

But being tired didn’t prevent me from starting with “Fellowship” again on Friday night, and this time being able to read right through to the end without needing to stop.

It Was Great…

[maybejuel]

For everyone who is already mad at JO because the new single is in English: They have said that the writing process was very therapeutic for Bojan so maybe he needed to write it in English. Also, 3 girls have cried after hearing it for the first time.

[rat-at-heart]

Dumb blonde? Think again - she has a degree in microbeanology

[samcat18]

"Okay but judge me a little by my cover, i worked hard on this"

Y E S

[underachieverse]

[rains-random-shit]

The scars he has are all from his love....

Some would look and see trash....

Some would look and see a monster....

Some would look and be afraid....

Some would think dirty or diseased.....

But it is all love....

Someone's everything.....

Don't judge based on what you think...

Take the time to care, to learn what things really are.

[gurugirl]

Just went back in to read Don't Judge a Book on Patreon and you changed the header for it! Love the look. Who is that man by the way? Looks like it could be Harry walking around in his whitey tighteys all sexy and dom.

Also a part 2 bestie 🙏🏽

Oh I'm so glad you're going back for seconds! I literally just changed the header this morning 🤭 Thank you for your support btw 🥰

And that's Christian Bordin 🥵 He's on instagram if you want to see more of that gorgeous man 👀

Also part 2 is coming (I think this is going to be ongoing shorts with their adventures so I'm about to make a subsection for it in the masterlist). Maybe today (it's just gonna be kinda short like the first part)??? I'm sorry I could not help myself. I was supposed to give y'all another part of neighborry today (it's almost ready) but maybe neighborry will be ready tomorrow lol. My brain just does what it wants really so my patrons have to deal with my unorganized ways 😂 But I feel like y'all stay happy as long as I feed you three posts per week!

Here's the updated pic if anyone wants to see it 👀 (also added to my google docs as well for those who read my patreon fics over there).

xoxo

[tallestxiang]

I find it silly that people hate cockroaches so much because "they're invasive pests". No they aren't? HOUSEHOLD cockroaches are invasive pests, and they're actually among the minority of the species.

The majority of cockroaches live in the wild and you would not even know they aren't beetles or a different kind of insect. Even greenhouse cockroaches avoid humans and are only invasive to plants.

These specimen are all cockroaches (note that they come from multiple different countries and settings), and none of them will be living in your pantry anytime soon.

warning: insect pictures below!

Specimen shown: Indian Domino Cockroach, Beetle mimicking Cockroach and Emerald Cockroach

Credit: Google Images

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

This is the single most generic description of a book I have ever read in my entire life. I didn't think it was possible to cram so many cliches into a single paragraph. They may as well have said he needs to stop the bad guys and save the world.

[an-indigo-moose]

Good Omens Gabriel

In season 2 of Good Omens, we see Gabriel, called Jim, re-organizing the books in the bookshop. However, the way he organizes these books seems absolutely inane. The fastest, most childish way to organize a set of anything would be by size or by color. He does not do that. He could have alphabetized by author or title, because that information is right on the cover of the book. He alphabetized by first sentence. To sort the books, he has to actually stop, open the book, and read. Beyond not judging a book by its cover, he wouldn't even sort a book by its cover. It makes so much sense on second watch. I love when a twist ending has enough foreshadowing to be satisfying.