#so I started on a bookcase

[yellobb]

“Nothing lasts forever….”

Day 2 - Spiders

[stuckinapril]

i really am the kind of bitch who loves reading textbooks huh

[lemongogo]

question . what do u guys do w ur old sketchbooks

[halfbit]

fun guessing game you get to have with your family when you're mixed: was the shit they pulled racially motivated or not

[autoneurotic]

look at my cute studio. very pleased with the hanging zines! won’t lose any pieces now and they won’t get all marked up

[hauntedwoman]

this entire trip back to texas for the wedding i have realized my dad is so autistic and that's literally the only thing wrong with him

[crownedcroweprince]

...

[staffatemyblog]

Give me opportunity for minimalism and I will kill it with clutter and color. My room was driving me crazy while it was empty, I'm so happy to have it (mostly) put back together now

[the-busy-ghost]

Being a very unfit and moderately small person trying to build bad quality flatpack furniture is like do I take the lower back pain from trying to bend myself into bizarre positions or ask for someone else to help, bearing in mind that it will end in a lot of shouting

[voluptuarian]

Tagged by @ravenkings (😘😘) to post 9 books I'm planning to read in 2023. I am also concentrating on making some progress on my To Read pile this year, so most of these are books I've already gotten my hands on, but haven't gotten around to reading (or just haven't finished) yet.

tagging: @kecharitomene, @thelovelygods, @a-story-teller, @iskarieot, @morgainelefaey

[bootyful-seventeen]

Quick question for the homies who have a bookshelf to display their kpop albums and/or mangas and figures, what kind of method or style do you like?

[audiovisualrecall]

Hm keep having the same...Dream? Nightmare? Anyway maybe I should take it as a warning...

[quiltedlovers]

im not booktok’s intended audience and am a hashtag hater for many reasons but jack edwards is doing something right

[murasaki-sama]

I return after a week to announce most of my property is destroyed.

There was a fire in the storage facility I use, back at the end of August. They did not let us have access to our property until mid-November, by which time the residual water damage was severe. I lost all my furniture, about 70-90% of my 700+ books collection, including the entire WOT (twice over as I had most in both paperback and hardcover), Queen's Thief series by @meganwhalenturner, the 25-30 Discworld by Terry Pratchett books I had thus far managed to collect, and a significant collection of Anne McCaffrey books. All ruined by mold and water warping.

And in the same week I also managed to kill my second computer in a year (or year and a half). So that was horrible.

Anyway, I have spent the last week trying to save clothing/linen, one or two small pieces of furniture that maybe survived, and the like 10% of books which have no mold (one box out of 13 remained completely dry) or only a little mold - including a gold leaf covered Torah from my grandpa, who passed several years ago.

Its been exhausting, and I still have way more work to do. So yeah.

That was my week.

How'd everyone else's go?

[waffled0g]

Everyone gets “The 90s” look wrong and I hate it

Couple years ago I saw these two board games at the store back to back. Well, not saw them per se, but ya know. Spied them out of the corner of my eye. And for a moment without reading the text, I couldn’t tell you which was which decade at first. Funny. Either they were in a rush to get these out the door or they wanted their throwback trivia game boxes to look uniform. I didn’t think too much of it.

Only, from then on I started seeing it MORE. Every time someone markets a 90s or 80s throwback...

Goddammit they’re identical! What??! How did we let this happen? As a 90s survivor and a designer, this drives me up a wall.

Look, I know I’m late to the party to complain about “the 90s look” when we’re just starting to get sick of the Y2K nostalgia train. But c’mon, the 90s were not The 80s: Part Two™ 

Trust me when I say that we weren’t all wearing neon trapezoids up until the year 2000. The 90s look being peddled is so specific to the tail end of the 80s and an early early part of the 90s - a part of the 90s when it wouldn’t stop being the 80s. This is Memphis design being conflated with the wrong decade.

Keep reading for a long ass graphic design history lesson and pictures of old soda and fast food.

Specifically, the look is Memphis Milano, self-named by the Italian design house Memphis Group. Starting in the early to mid 80s, they made all sorts of furniture, fabrics and sculptures that were like a Piet Mondrian grid painting under heavy radiation. Their whole deal was defying the standards of existing industrial design up to that point on purpose. Chairs had weird arches, bookcases would be in strange alien colors, unusual materials like plastic or elastic were used in place of metal or wood, that sorta thing.

Memphis quickly became the signature look for the decade. You can tell something’s influenced by Memphis design from it’s telltale trademarks:

Clashing, neon colors.

Use of diametric shapes.

Contrasting patterns like zebra print stripes, confetti squiggles and checkerboards.

It wasn’t long before Memphis Milano-inspired design was everywhere in 80s pop culture:

It was a special time, yes.

I was a kindergartener at the tail end of the 80s, so I knew Memphis mostly through the lens of kids media. Toys, clothes, games, tv shows used it like candy colored catnip. Cable channel Nickelodeon more or less adopted the Memphis aesthetic as their signature in-house style and practically built a monument to it at a Florida theme park:

I think this is why folks mistake what decade Memphis is representative of - 90s staples like Nick, Saved By The Bell, Fresh Prince - they all stayed around much longer than the design trend’s expiration date. 

Couple that notion with the fact that companies are slow followers to design trends. Something gets popular and they want to get on the bandwagon? Gotta wait for the ink to dry, gotta wait for the production molds to be made. It would take a few years for them to completely work Memphis outta their system.

Now, this is not to say Memphis is bad! Personally I’m a fan of the aesthetic, if my neon-drenched artwork wasn’t a tip-off already. But it is a trend, and trends never last forever.

So what took the Memphis Milano look down for good? This part’s up for debate, but I personally think it had something to do with this dude:

It’s that grunge music from Seattle that’s so popular with the kids these days dontchaknow.

Once Smells Like Teen Spirit hit in 1991, the Nirvana tone drove the rest of the decade. Clean geometry became weathered, grainy and organic. Bright neon pastels became more bold. Bubblegum pop music sounded fake and manufactured. Attitude and apathy was authentic. Whatever.

Things got grungy. Things got grimy. Olestra was invented.

I think the best way to visualize this transition is how Cherry Coke entered the decade and how it left it:

1992 Memphis on the left, 1998 grunge junkie on the right. Fitting that the 90s would end with a design that looked like Darth Maul’s lungs.

Okay, so what should 90s retro design look like?

Continue on to PART TWO! Spoilers: No VHS filters or vaporwave needed, but maybe bring an antacid.

[thebibliosphere]

There are a lot of things I'm sad about in my life. You don't get to go through the kind of medical trauma I've been through and come out unscathed on the other side.

But one thing I'm really bitter about is that I can't remember my wedding anymore. The pernicious anemia took it from me and wiped my brain clean. Except it's not clean, not really. I remember it in patches. Like red wine stains on a white rug that have never quite lifted out no matter how hard you try.

I look at the pictures on my bookcase, and they feel like remembering a story someone else has told me. There's a young woman in a white dress wearing my face, and she looks happy. I'm happy for her. But you can see the strain around her eyes, too. The pain she's hiding because no one with authority believes her when she says her body doesn't feel right. That something is Wrong.

They won't believe her for another decade. They won't believe her until it's almost too late, and it's that lateness that will rob her of her memories and turn them into a wavering rainbow suspended in the fine haze of watery sunlight that occasionally surfaces through the blanks.

There's one memory that's real, though. Solid. It's not my vows. It's not my father walking me down the aisle. (Though those are there, just hazy and dream-like). It's our first dance.

It's the lights dimming around the room as the staff cleared the floor, causing the fishbowls full of white roses and LED lights on the tables to wobble like pools of moonlight against dark paneled walls.

It's the band inviting us out onto the floor and us giggling because we know what's coming next, and no one else does. It's the twang of a banjo reverberating around the room through the speakers, followed by the dulcet tones of Kermit the Frog wondering why there are so many songs about rainbows.

It's us waltzing around the enclosed circle of light, singing to each other out of tune and grinning like idiots as everyone around us starts to laugh.

It's everyone joining in on the song because it's the Muppets, and everyone knows the words. It's 100+ people singing the Rainbow Connection, some laughing, some a bit tearful, because it's bringing back memories. Because it's making a new one.

It's looking up at my new husband through the brain fog and all the pain in my body and thinking, "I want to remember this moment forever."

I don't know what entity was out there listening to me at that moment and chose to grant that wish. I don't know why this is the one memory that stuck while everything else in my brain got decimated into scattered, fragmented snapshots. But I'm so, so thankful it is.