a blog for all things ranging from my favourite movies to religious oil paintings to homosexuality
CURRENT INTERESTS:
-the walking dead: saints and sinners
-the lost boys
-oil paintings
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-stevethekingharrington
-gothjonathanbyers
-j0nathanby3rs
-bloodiedbyers
-letprecioustimegoby
tag guide for me (i will not be elaborating as to what any of them contain) ((there’s a significant amount of blood and guts in the first four as opposed to the reasonable amount of blood and guts in the rest of them so be wary of that if it squicks you out))
Okay. Say you ask a small child to draw you a house, and they come up with something like this:
ALT
For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.
So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn't trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?
Cool.
So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?
Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn't look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?
Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?
Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?
Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.
Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn't know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.
Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”
Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.
Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.
Ultimately, it's not about what the writer intended. That's what the whole death of the author thing means.
If you think of literature like as a conversation, then think of all the analysis stuff that your English teacher keeps trying to get you to look at as like body language. It's the stuff that the other person doesn't even necessarily mean to communicate, but that can tell you a hell of a lot about what they mean.
Also, a poem written by a poet who got high is still a poem written by a poet.
People love to say dismissive bullshit like, "oh, that's just the drugs talking" but actually, drugs can't fucking talk! It is always the human being doing the talking regardless of how intoxicated they are. The drugs are not creating the poetry. The poet's mind is creating the poetry. A person doesn't stop being a person just because they took something.
David Bowie said he was so high the year he wrote the album Hunky Dory that he didn't remember writing it (in fact he said he didn't remember anything about the year).
This is the album that includes "Life on Mars?", which many people consider to be some pretty cutting commentary on Marxism and capitalism.
Bowie himself could not tell you what that song is about, or if it's about anything at all. But quite a few people have found a lot of meaning in it.
My teenager is working on a big art project for school and they said their meanings tend to be very surface level
Their work is about flora and fauna is a mix of bone motifs, animal shapes and natural flora intertwining to create one beast that symbolises the land
And when I pointed out that it seemed to me like a commentary on how the ecosystem works and every part is reliant on another and how life and death are two sides of the same coin they didn't go "no I was just doing surface level nature is cool" they went "oh yeah! I can see it now!"
And I've had that experience as well
Sometimes artists don't know the meaning until other people point it out
being a symbolism enjoyer should humble you because at the end of the day no matter how eloquently you articulate it youre essentially saying "i love it when things have meaning"
hey when you make posts, i just want you to know, thou/thee/thy/thine/ye are like he/you(object)/your/yours/you(subject) okay? "thou art wearing shoes," "i will wear shoes for thee," okay?
you say thine if the next word starts with a vowel and thy if the next word starts with a consonant and they both mean "your" so "thine own shoes," "thy shoes," okay?
and ye means you and refers to the subject of a sentence, "ye members of the brotherhood of shoes," okay? you need this information to create better knight yaoi. i'm personally more interested in nun yuri but we are a community
straight people are so fascinating even when they aren't actively trying to be homophobic. I had a class a few years ago where one assignment was to summarize some eighth century arabic poetry about going out for drinks with the lads before indulging in some gay sex and like half the class came in and said "I'm sorry idk what was happening in this one, they mention having sex with a servant but they also say the servant's a man? where'd the woman come from? I'm so confused." and a few days ago in a shakespeare class I made a comment about how cleopatra and octavius caesar are kind of parallel characters in possessively bartering for mark antony's attention and one of my classmates responded as though I'd been talking about octavia and not caesar, despite the fact that I said "caesar" and "him" multiple times while describing the actions he specifically took. fully incapable of comprehending of anything that's even a little bit gay.
A week ago I was losing my mind over 1 sale, now I’ve sold 81 digital copies and 52 physical ones.
Over 100 people bought my game!!!!????? This is mind blowing. I don’t even know how to process this. I am so grateful. I would not have sold nearly this many without yall sharing this post as much as you did. I love you all so much. Thank you for making this happen. You all made my childhood dream come true in a bigger way than I thought possible.
Holy cats!! Thank you so much @pointless-achievements. You’re achievement caused the notes on this post to blow up by 4x, and now 70 copies have sold?! I’ve sold 70 copies!!!
