#blogs

[el-amor-de-nadie]

[equipo]

Si la sigues, llegarás hasta el blog de @debbie-sketch con un poco de barro en las botas y muchas ganas de salir a buscar nuevas aventuras.

Niña Jaguar

[70sscifiart]

thank you for linking cameraviscera dot com for that joann daley post! currently looking through all of their artist collections and im so in love. So sad to see that they seem to have stopped posting :( do you know of any more similar websites? I'd love to support people who do cool stuff like this!!

Thanks for asking! I love pop culture/art blogs; here are some good ones. Most of them are still active!

We Are The Mutants (and their older blog 2 Warps to Neptune)

Unquiet Things

Vintage RPG

feuilleton

The Art of Cover Art

Transfer Orbit

Mars Will Send No More

Also I have a weekly art blog over here that's just called 70s Sci-Fi Art!

You should all sign up for the email! The next issue's going to be about "overgrown ruins" in retro sci-fi art and I'm excited.

Edit: @papaya-inspiration reblogged to mention Dreams of Space, which is a great shout. I also remembered Web Curios, which is more "modern internet creativity" focused, but definitely worth checking out.

[domono08]

For @impresively-large-swan who wanted me to draw my favorite little guy and my little guy is Rev from Loonatics Unleashed! He’s my precious

[redrotmegaphone]

Special Collections have a unique need for blogs, moreso than other kinds of libraries. Regular social media sites like Instagram and Twitter don't have the space to share the research, history, and context that unique historic materials require, and that our staff are uniquely situated to investigate and share.

I appreciate a good post with context!

Natalie Nitsch, a newly minted graduate of the Divinity School's MA program, has been a Rare Books Assistant for the past year. In honor of her last day, she wrote about one of her favorites from our collections: MS 120, a 13th-century manuscript containing Petrus Comestor's Historia Scholastica (and plenty of evidence of use by centuries of former owners). Congratulations, Natalie!

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Many scholars of medieval manuscripts are drawn to their field because of the ability of old books to, as it were, make eye contact with a person from across the centuries. Of course, manuscripts are neither animate (though I wonder about the life of the deer and livestock who gave up their skins for their binding and pages, and the wasp larvae that once inhabited the oak galls used in ink) nor conscious (though I always say goodbye to a manuscript when I reshelve it for the last time). Nevertheless they reward careful looking uncannily well, in a way that I have come to conceive of as meeting and holding the gaze of modern viewers. Of the materials I have written descriptions of over the past year of my employment---130 codex manuscripts and the hundred-odd piece Wandel Collection of Manuscript Fragment---UC’s MS 120 held my gaze the longest and looked back the hardest.

By way of its less recent history, MS 120 was written in the 12th or early 13th century in Germany. It contains an imperfect copy of the 12th-century Historia Scholastica by Petrus Comestor (whose name, delightfully, translates to Peter the Eater), a Biblical paraphrase that enjoyed huge popularity in the medieval period. MS 120 resided at either the Benedictine priory of St. Jakobsberg near Mainz or the Premonstratensian monastery at Steinfeld, both in modern-day Germany, until the desecularization of many German religious houses in the early 19th century. It was then acquired by the 18th-century German theologian Leander van Ess, and subsequently owned by the famed English book collector and ‘vellomaniac’ Thomas Phillipps, Baronet, in 1824. After the dispersal of Phillipps’ collection, it made its way to Ricketts.

By way of its recent history, MS 120 was given to the University of Chicago just before Christmas in 1924 by Coella Lindsay Ricketts (almost as delightful a name as Peter the Eater), a self-described “scribe, illuminator, and binder” who, among other occupations, produced the parchment diplomas issued by the U of C for the first several decades of its existence. MS 120 apparently looked back at Ricketts, just as it looked back at me: in Ricketts’ presentation letter to then-University president Ernest D. Burton, he writes, “Here is an old manuscript on vellum that has been knocking around this world for seven hundred years or more, and thinking that is long enough, I want it to find a permanent home where it will be welcome and appreciated and enjoy companionship.” I imagine he said a fond goodbye to MS 120 before sending it across the city, presumably by courier.

The reason MS 120 held my eye for so long is not necessarily its copious annotations, though it does appear to have been continuously annotated by monks from its creation to the 18th century, when it was acquired by Ess. (Frankly, copious annotations are cool, but a bit of a pain for a person writing a description of a manuscript. They are 1. not often written legibly and 2. not usually particularly revealing.) Its erased 13th century musical notation on four-line staves (ff. 46r-47r, f. 106r) is similarly eye-catching, but must be left for some future researcher to decipher; they are illegible even using the usual imaging methods that help scholars to read faint text. Two relatively minor and unimportant details were, instead, what stared me down.

First, there is a drawing of a woman on the right margin of f. 44r. It was done with a sharp instrument that had no pigmentation, so it is nearly impossible to see unless you hold the parchment at the right angle---imagine the impressions that are left on the next page of a notepad if you press hard with your pencil. (These kinds of annotations, not uncommon in parchment manuscripts, are often called “scratch” or “fingernail” glosses, because they can also be done with a fingernail.) The woman doesn’t seem to have anything in particular to do with the text that accompanies her, a commentary on the First Commandment, “you shall have no other gods before me”. It’s impossible to know which German monk drew her, or why, or who she is intended to represent; she has no identifiable attributes, and the art quality is not that of a master (her eyes bulge). She is fascinating to me mainly because of her invisibility and anonymity. I flipped past this page several times without noticing her, and the fact that I did eventually---I believe I selected the text on this page to check against an edition of the Historia Scholastica totally by chance---felt like MS 120 rewarding me for my diligence. I wondered how many of MS 120’s former owners had noticed this woman, and whether they had any more of an idea than I did about what she was doing there.

The second detail is even less arresting than a marginal drawing, but felt even more like a direct intervention from MS 120. A previous library assistant had noted that a break in the text at one spot in the manuscript, between the pages labelled f. 121 and f. 122---essentially, that some text was missing. After some comparison with an online edition of the Historia Scholastica, I discovered that there was, indeed, about a page’s worth of text missing. I recorded it in my very-21st century description (in an Excel spreadsheet, in accordance with modern descriptive cataloging standards) in the following terms: “Text is complete except for the contents of one folio following f. 121. Text ends at Migne P.L. Vol 198 col. 1366D ‘qua terminata iterum dedica[tione]’ and picks back up at 1369C ‘[sacrifi]cia et frequenta’.” Giving the page a final once-over, I noticed a small note at the bottom of the page (f. 121v), in a medieval hand: “Hic deficit 1 folio”, or, “Here, one page is missing.” Someone who lived at least a half a millennium ago had noted concisely and exactly what I needed to know, not knowing that the simple fact of a missing page would ever need to be recorded in such detail as I recorded it, nor that anyone would need to fiddle around with a digital edition of the text to figure out how much text the manuscript was missing. It was as simple as “here, one page is missing”, all along.

Medieval manuscripts, perhaps more than any other artifact of the past, are indelibly, undeniably human. That should be enough to hold our attention, and our collective gazes.

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[salmonella-destroyer-of-worlds]

[aneyariss]

ECRIVEZ "✋️" EN COMMENTAIRE SI VOUS ETES FRANÇAIS !

[wolfsheart-blog]

Wolf by Animal Photograph by Ramona Heiner

[lixxen]

Hey guys now that Tiktok is shit officially, can we go back to making website blogs where we talk about random shit and just follow each other like we used to

But not in a Tumblr way where we have blogs, but legit ones where we just talk and make full posts. People can dedicate them to hobbies and do mixed stuff! There can be a blog with dedicated use of directory where people can submit theirs

I think that it would be a good way for people to bring back an older form of "social media". People have been talking about having another shift because of Meta/X/Tiktok doing shitty things (and I personally don't want to go to Xiaohongshu because I am afraid Americans will heavily disrupt the app)

I will literally make one and teach you guys how to make WordPress blogs/use WordPress is a very basic article how-to. We had to make them for my classes

[ijustreallylikepirates]

Sorry for obsessing over fictional gay couples

It will happen again

[alazarrr]

[myfandomrealitea]

Pre-emptively blocking people is good for everyone.

Seriously. The amount of times I see people whining or laughing about being blocked when they 'haven't even done anything' just tells me that not many of you know its actually a really good way to properly curate your online space, and its not something to be offended over.

Blocking is a form of protection. Its also a form of mutual protection.

Especially on websites that don't offer more extensive or usable filtering, tagging and avoidance options. Twitter, for example.

Blocking isn't some personal insult. Its a method of saying; hey, we clearly shouldn't interact, so I'm gonna build this soundproof wall between us to make sure we can't.

To use The Salmon Analogy, if I run a restaurant based on salmon as the main ingredient, and you're allergic or or severely dislike salmon, me refusing to serve you isn't a personal sleight. Its me recognising that you can't or really don't want to eat salmon, and its me protecting you from an unpleasant experience and myself from you inevitably screaming at me for serving salmon.

If you are someone who enjoys 'objectionable' content, such as gore, and you stumble across an extremely anti-gore blog, its absolutely a viable option to pre-emptively block them. Maybe your paths never would've crossed, but its better to ensure they don't than potentially wind up the victim or hate or harassment.

Blocking is an absolute sure-fire way to ensure that you do not see something you do not want to. It should be used as liberally as you want to.

[salmonella-destroyer-of-worlds]