Today i will recall who were the four Lords in Dark Souls

Hopefully that's all of them. I think I didn't forget someone this time.

@cerastes yay! im so glad. im gonna return to firelink shrine and chug some estus flasks with my bros now.

Can't afford art school?

After seeing post like this 👇

And this gem 👇

As well as countless of others from the AI generator community. Just talking about how "inaccessible art" is, I decided why not show how wrong these guys are while also helping anyone who actually wants to learn.

Here is the first one ART TEACHERS! There are plenty online and in places like youtube.

📺Here is my list:

Second part BOOKS, I have collected some books that have helped me and might help others.

📚Here is my list:

📝As for Supplies, I recommend starting out cheap, buying Pencils and art paper at dollar tree or 5 below. If you want to go fancy Michaels is always a good place for traditional supplies. They also get in some good sales and discounts. For digital art, I recommend not starting with a screen art drawing tablet as they are usually more expensive.

For the Best art Tablet I recommend either Xp-pen, Bamboo or Huion. Some can range from about 40$ to the thousands.

💻As for art programs here is a list of Free to pay.

NOTE: Some of these can work on almost any computer like Clip and Sai but others will require a bit stronger computer like Blender. Please check their sites for if your computer is compatible.

So do with this information as you will but as you can tell there are ways to learn how to become an artist, without breaking the bank. The only thing that might be stopping YOU from using any of these things, is YOU.

I have made time to learn to draw and many artist have too. Either in-between working two jobs or taking care of your family and a job or regular school and chores. YOU just have to take the time or use some time management, it really doesn't take long to practice for like an hour or less. YOU also don't have to do it every day, just once or three times a week is fine.

Hope this was helpful and have a great day.

Boosting this in case any of the programs and books suggested are useful.

All the photos on this tumblr ad the animal photo reference site I run is another resource available for artists to use!

As long as you’re not using AI to create your art, you can reference / trace / draw / recombine / make any sort of art you want, with any of the photos, for free.

There's also MORPHO, a really good book series on anatomy by Michel Lauricella, with very clear explanations and sketches!

And for pose references, there's @adorkastock who shares a ton of them for free, with different models and props, and her website is amazing <3 you can also buy pose packs from her.

Hawaiʻi is currently in the midst of a natural disaster if you didnt know

Apparently there isn’t much news coverage of this outside of the islands

Towns are flooded, homes destroyed and collapsed, roads collapsed, lives at risk, gas leaks from the flood damage

Haleiwa and Waialua are currently evacuated because the 120 year old dam is at risk of bursting

Mind you that damn is owned by Dole. Theyve known about it needing to be fixed for years and years and years. Despite having more than enough money they refuse

The state has been trying to buy it out from them for years so they can fix it, but the sale hasn’t gone through

Keep in mind that the Dole family were the ones who illegally imprisoned Queen Liliuʻokalani and illegally overthrew the monarchy.

If I see another goddamn person say how sad this is for the tourists whose “trips were ruined” and compare a messed up vacation to people losing their homes, belongings, and livelihoods, I’m going to lose my mind

I am so lucky that my family or friend’s are safe and the few whose houses flooded didnt have it too bad, but so so so many were not as fortunate

If you haven’t heard anything about this until now, I suggest looking into it

The sirens didn’t go off until the flood had been going on for hours. Our state government is spending so much money on a fucking monorail we don’t need rather than fixing the infrastructure.

It’s been the locals and Kanaka doing the most to help get people to safety from the start

I don’t really know how to end this

I just need to know people are aware

I need to know people are seeing whats happening

Conditions Apply [ 10 colors ]

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

I wish I could travel through time and transcend language to hold this woman’s hand and tell her “girl, he ain’t shit”

what the fuck

ohhhh you elfsturbating 😧😲

Oh!

Thank you all, i needed further explanation - And i do find it might help me!

Please join me in a moment of silence for people who work in retail, hospitality and events now that December has started

Ok I tried this and it was a HUGE hit!

Main recommendations: Season the dough AND season the filling. Also, make smaller loafs, about the size of a spatula head, for easy flipping!

Here’s how they look! Recipe below (doubled bc I have a big family).

Loaded Potato Loafs

Couple of notes:

Tumblr killed me (isuggestforcefem) for "harassment"

blahblah message me for my discord account and all that whatever

Oh yeah and reblog for reach that too

2007 eBird gem

@salticid​ you’re amazing and I love ur cryptic spambot convo I hope u like this!!

[twitter]

IVE FOUND IT AT LAST

hey so don't use this. RabbelLabs, the company actually creating this platform, trains AI models. Jack Dorsey is best friends with Elon Musk and they both advocate constantly for the abolition of IP law because it stands in the way of AI 'growth' (theft). They're banning AI on the platform so they can use it as a clean slate to train more fucking AI. They're also using images of Divine, the drag queen, to push their shit and I guarantee they didn't get permission from her estate.

The DiVine website says that it's made by Rabble.

If you go to their website you can find this:

if you click that And Other Stuff you're taken to an entirely different website that explains what all that 'other stuff' is: five pillars of building Nostr AI.

You have to wonder why they're hiding it, right? Why is it so hard to find? Why register an entirely different domain (it's andotherstuff.com, not like rabblelabs.com/andotherstuff) just to talk about the AI stuff you're doing if you're so proud of it?

Stop simping for billionaires just because they jingle keys in your face, start doing some fucking research.

obsessed with the person on reddit who’s been reading thier mum who knows nothing about pokemon the bulbapedia descriptions and then she draws what she thinks they look like from that alone

i love you slightly unhinged old british storybook style pokemon that illustrate the importance of accurate text descriptions i hope reddit user BazF91 and his mum are having a great day <3

Here's some more, just for fun!! I highly recommend clicking on the link

Quite delightful

How delightful!

May you have the confidence of a medieval bestiary artist drawing an animal he has never seen, never will see, and hasn’t got the slightest idea of what it looks like

May you have the confidence of a medieval bestiary blogger posting animals from renaissance paintings they've never looked into, never will look into, and haven’t got the slightest idea of what a medieval bestiary even is

“marginalia”

hey @feminist-mina-harker please elaborate on the chameleon bestiary rant

Okay, since you asked for it, here is the chameleon bestiary rant.

This is a chameleon from a lavish thirteenth-century bestiary, Bodley MS 764, produced in England c. 1240.

'Haha', you say, 'look at those idiot scribes! They drew a rainbow horse instead of a lizard!'

That's when I hit you over the head with a baseball bat and tell you to shut your fucking mouth.

Because of course this illuminator had never seen a chameleon--the vast majority of chameleon species live in sub-Saharan Africa, with a few in Asia and one in the southernmost part of Europe. Only a very few people had the ability to travel extensively during this time, and it was extremely risky to do so even if you were one of the tiny percentage who had the means.

Instead, they relied on descriptions--written, not verbal--from the few people who had traveled, such as this one:

'The chameleon is not all of one colour, but is multi-coloured, like the pard. It is able to vary the colours of its body very easily, whereas the bodies of other animals cannot readily be changed in this way. The chameleon-pard is so called because while it is like the pard in having white spots, its neck is like that of a horse, its feet like those of an ox, but its head is like that of a camel.' (Richard Barber, 1992, pp. 67-68)

'But Lucy,' you would say, had you not been thoroughly concussed with the baseball bat, 'chameleons don't look like leopard-horse-ox-camel hybrids! That's crazy!' And if you had said this, I would beat you over the head again, and say yes they do, if you think about it for more than thirty seconds.

Let's start with the first part of the description: 'it is like the pard in having white spots.' You see those little white spots around that central stripe? Check.

Second: 'its neck is like that of a horse.' That dorsal ridge is pretty reminiscent of a mane, and when they stretch their necks, you can see the resemblance to the musculature of a horse:

Check.

Third: 'its feet like those of an ox.' You see those bifurcated toes, and the tiny claws at the end of them? That's an extremely distinctive feature of chameleons, and well worth describing. You know what other animal has bifurcated feet and would be very familiar to the medieval people back home in England? An ox, with cloven hooves:

Look at the claws at the end of chameleon toes and tell me you don't see the resemblance. Check.

Fourth: 'its head is like that of a camel.' This one's a little confusing until you remember that some camels have heads with prominent ridges/bumps, like this:

Looks like a smaller version of the crest on our second lil chameleon, no? Check.

'But Lucy,' you'd interrupt again if you still had all your teeth, 'that might explain the description, but not the drawing--they got it all wrong!' To which I would reply that the description was all these illuminators had. They couldn't have conversations with the travelers directly to gather what exactly they meant by 'feet of an ox' (bifurcated) or 'head of a camel' (crested)--they only had the words themselves.

So you end up with this image, which very much does have the white spots of a leopard, the neck of a horse, the feet of an ox, and the head of a camel.

And since they didn't have any other guidance as to size, body shape, tail, etc., they improvise those based on the animals the description said it resembles--the body shape of a horse, the tail of an ox, etc.

In conclusion, don't be mean to medieval illuminators. They were not stupid, they were not overconfident; they were simply doing the best they could with the information that was given to them.

And if you have a problem with that, my baseball bat is always ready.

Okay, I really feel I should step in and say something. Much as I appreciate this defense of the artist, I must address the elephant in the room. Or rather, the giraffe. foreshadowing

First off, as I've discussed before on this very weblog, bestiaries were not based on traveler's tales. They copied and paraphrased previous authoritative Classical works, with additions, omissions, and alterations creeping in as copies were made of copies. In the case of MS Bodley 764, the primary sources were an earlier bestiary and On the Nature of Things by Rabanus Maurus, along with Gerald of Wales, Hugh of Fouilloy, and Peter of Cornwall as other sources. Meanwhile, the bestiary's obsession with finding the etymology of names is a holdover from Isidore of Seville, another major source. And ultimately all bestiaries owe their existence to the Physiologus (Barber, 1993).

And things got confusing! Because as mentioned, the process of copying and rewriting previous authors led to all sorts of confusion. I've already talked about how a sea monster evolved from Aristotle's account of the elephant filtered through a Latin translation from an Arabic translation from the Greek.

Classical authors were well aware of what chameleons look like. Aristotle talks about the chameleon having a lizard's body, with descending ribs and a backbone that sticks up like a fish. He describes its face as apelike, its tail as long, its feet as divided into two parts - in fact, he goes into detail about how the feet have five toes, with the ones in front having three in and two out, the ones in the back having three out and two in. He even describes the chameleon's bizarre turreted eyes (Aristotle, 1862). Hm, I should look into a newer translation of Aristotle, come to think of it.

But that's not the point. The point is that at least as far back as Aristotle, people knew what a chameleon looked like. Above is the chameleon Aristotle would have been familiar with, the common chameleon (the chameleon posted further above is from Madagascar). I guess you could say the spots look leopardy? Either way, the description still seems... wrong.

Let's take a look at it then. There's something fishy about it. Don't worry, I'll highlight it.

What gives? What animal are we talking about here, a chameleon or a chameleon-pard? And why does it live in Ethiopia? We just said chameleons are found in Europe!

And this is where it starts to make sense. These are two separate accounts, one about a color-changing animal called a chameleon and one about an Ethiopian animal called a chameleon-pard. You probably know it by another name.

That's right, the giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis). See, the name's right there! Because it was seen as having spots like a pard/leopard (that's another thing to discuss) and otherwise camel features! These are two different animals!

The last piece of the puzzle comes from the source of this information. In this case, Bodley 764 copies almost verbatim from Isidore of Seville.

And there you have it. Isidore of Seville describes the chameleon and the giraffe in sequence. Our bestiarist followed his lead, but took "camelopard" to be "chameleon-pard". And, as far as I can tell, the artist either treated them both as the same animal, or just illustrated one of them (the chameleon-pard).

Either way, this confusion of the chameleon with the camelopard/chameleon-pard led to, for instance, this depiction of the chameleon in the Ortus Sanitatis, accessed here.

On the other hand, other sources give us a more reptilian chameleon, such as Valenciennes 0320 (Cantimpré's Liber de natura rerum, accessed here).

References

Aristotle, Cresswell, R. trans. (1862) Aristotle’s History of Animals. Henry G. Bohn, London.

Barber, R. (1993) Bestiary. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge.

Isidore of Seville, trans. Barney, S. A.; Lewis, W. J.; Beach, J. A.; and Berghof, O. (2006) The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Not a manuscript, but relevant to our interests (alas we do not have an illustrated bestiary in our collection, but perhaps someday)