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Ada is an alchemist

@adasheadached / adasheadached.tumblr.com

Orenda | she/her | 🇵🇱 | art's fun | I get my ideas from the only reliable source: cryptic symbolism in my dreams
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Reblogged hellodarjeeling
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Ex-libris by the Catalan artist Alexandre de Riquer (1856-1920), made around the year 1900. These ones are some of the examples preserved in the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC).

An ex-libris, also called bookplate, is a kind of printed stamp at the beginning or end of a book that says who owns it (think of the stamp you surely have seen in the books owned by a library). Though ex-libris have been used since ancient times, their "golden age" in Catalonia was during the Modernist movement (the Catalan equivalent of Art Nouveau), where many bookworm people commissioned artists to have a beautiful personal ex-libris that they could use to stamp all their collection.

The text in the 1st one, written in the Catalan language, says "no matter how much you know, there's always much more that you don't know" (per molt que sapies es molt mes lo que ignores).

Source: Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.

#art#ex libris#catalonia#art history#history
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Reblogged chevrefoille
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Some character designs with some…atypical color choices? I guess. I don’t know what’s going on in that area.

This is Nimona and her supervillain friend (He doesn’t have a name yet, I’m working on that). Nimona is his sidekick/squire, they’re like the Batman and Robin of slightly Medieval villains, but she’s actually way more evil than him. He does what he does to make a point, and he doesn’t really want anyone get hurt - Nimona just gets a kick out of destroying stuff.

I’m going to attempt to make a two page comic with them? We’ll see how this goes.

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This was tagged #homework and posted in December 2011.

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#art#nimona#how it started vs how it's going
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Reblogged
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since watching ds9 + getting a classics degree i've been plagued by thoughts of the extremely prominent parallels between cardassia and rome; please take these bullet points as a proof of concept for the completely unhinged fanworks i'll inevitably make about this.

so, what does it mean to be roman/cardassian? what do rome/cardassian ask of you?

  • loyalty to rome/cardassia above all else. you give your entire life to The State. you give your autonomy to The State. The State is more important than you and your children. for the sake of The State you will go silently to your death or you will commit horrific atrocities in its name. nothing could possibly be of greater importance.
  • The State directly becomes religion. you worship The State above all else. it keeps you safe. you will die to protect it. you offer up yourself as a sacrifice to the ideal of The State and the people who built it become your gods. the romans institute imperial cult; under the cardassian union, dedication to The State moves to occupy the place that religious belief once did.
  • you have a duty to family and a duty to produce children. children are needed to support The State when you are dead. the family structure is a sham that you must buy into to produce more bodies for The State to use as its soldiers and its laborers. Family Is All but the state will demand you put it before your family and you will, every single time. (see livy's story of torquatus, who executed his son for not carrying out military orders; tain's treatment of garak in exile.)
  • hierarchy is baked into every level of society. the father has ownership over his children just as The State has ownership over you. the paterfamlias holds the right of life and death over his family; The State and its operatives hold the power of life and death over the people. life is a power struggle. who can be highest in the eyes of The State? who can be the most honored as a protector of the homeland? who can be as powerful in their household as The State is powerful over the homeland?
  • it is, of course, The State's right to expand by dominating others, just as it dominates you. The State knows how to keep its people quiet and content. it puts on shows replaying its victory over others over and over, and the people watch and cheer. the roman empire's guilty are executed in mass public spectacles, and its gladiators pantomime the defeat of its enemies; cardassia's trials are a vast public theatre where the punishment of the guilty serves as propagandistic entertainment.
  • everyone lies. the only way to live is to be eloquent and deceptive and question everyone. debate is your method of social expression. you give long speeches, in formal oratory or to your own friends and family, where the words you say mean nothing and the spaces between your words mean everything. criticism of The State comes covertly and quietly, shrouded in layers of obfuscation, between lines of a poem or a clever turn of phrase. to speak otherwise directly is a heresy of the highest order (until, that is, The State begins to slowly crumble).
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@exlibra i figured i'd pull this out into a full rb since... well, there's a lot here.

so! debate and speeches! first and foremost (as you probably already know) oratory is a huge cultural touchstone in ancient rome. it's an important component in the education of citizen boys; proper knowledge of oratory is essential to participate in public life, and lacking proper rhetorical skill can be a huge social stumbling block (see petr. satyrica 2).

we can see how this mentality is relevant to cardassians as well, both due to how essential argument is in their day-to-day social interactions and the way that verbal competition is involved in their social hierarchy; recall jellico's mention of cardassians' "instinctive need to establish a dominant position in any social gathering" in tng's chain of command.

your accurate observation (that a love for public speech and argument seems on its face somewhat awkward to combine with cardassians' need for social conformity) can be applied to rome as well. starting under augustus, there's nearly as clear a picture as there is on cardassia of what a good roman vir should be.

what i think the answer is here is that cardassia, like rome, was a republic before it was an empire. rhetoric is, of course, an absolutely essential skill to the political machine in a society governed by a senate. i imagine that life under the cardassian first republic, before the military takeover, might have been similar: much like rome, the need for eloquent political maneuvering would exist on the governmental scale and, as a result, gain an extreme cultural importance.

steven h. rutlidge's "oratory and politics in the empire" in a companion to roman rhetoric has some interesting insights into what happened to this senatorial rhetoric once the empire was established:

under the emperor, the specific kind of political debate ceases to have as much relevance, but that doesn't mean its importance to roman society evaporates overnight, and it ends up maintaining significance despite the fact that it must now operate in a more precarious context (you can't exactly run around delivering invectives against the emperor).

now how do you navigate these "restraints and limits"? roger rees has a good chapter on panegyric (praise-centered oratory) in the same book that i'm going to use as an example. first, because he opens the chapter like this:

which feels rather relevant to the way non-cardassians tend to view their practice of social maneuvering and obfuscation. second, though, since i'm (unfortunately) an avid cicero fan, he's always on my mind when i'm thinking about rhetoric, and rees has this to say on cicero's use of panygeric:

this is what i was getting at when i mentioned criticism of the cardassian state between the lines. warm, open praise of the empire is something we catch a lot from garak (and from other cardassians). concealing criticism within open speeches of praise is a perfect way of reconciling a culture's foundation on eloquent speech with the realities of what it means to live under imperial rule.

i mentioned poetry, as well, thinking about how ovid famously says that he was exiled from rome because of "carmen et error," "a poem and a mistake" (tristia 2.207), and how i always remember this phrase when i hear any mention of iloja of prim's vulcan exile. prim lived during the first republic, and could have, much like ovid, seen its end. the sort of poetic tightrope-walking that we can find in a lot of roman poetry, where criticism of the empire is shrouded in praise (ovid's met. and virgil's aeneid are two of the most commonly analyzed this way), feels really cardassian, and it therefore feels likely to me that iloja may have been exiled due to a carmen et error of his own.

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Absolutely scrumptious stuff; I was reading about Ovid and carmen et error just yesterday so serendipitous too.

#ds9#star trek#rome#star trek ds9#cardassians