Captainscruptious - Just Here To Linger Like The Pest I Am

“Ey Up Gromit, meet our new lodger, Mr Vorhees. He’s from America lad! He doesn’t say much but I think he likes Hockey! Keep him company whilst I go to the shops, there’s a good boy.”

All shot practically using miniatures and figures.

I feel like the overlap between people who are into yarncraft and people who are massive fantasy nerds is pretty high, so here is a thing:

Leo, the man behind MMario Designs, has sadly passed away. His family have made all of his knitting patterns free on Ravelry, and there are some gorgeous designs up there.

Do you like the Circle of Magic series by Tamora Pierce?

Tris:

Briar:

Frostpine:

Are you a Discworld fan?

Out Of Cheese:

Banks of the Anhk:

Lady Margolotta:

How about Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books?

Flames of Vykaendys:

Harper Hall shawl:

Harry Potter?

Godric:

Salazar:

Tolkien?

Shire Gardens:

Oakenshield:

Smaug:

These are only a few, you should totally go and check out the literally hundreds of designs up on the Ravelry page.

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Embroided, Amber Griffiths

Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

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another interesting dream i had last night.

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i love you practical effects i love you corn syrup blood i love you set designers i love you creature artists i love you makeup and prosthetics i love you costumers i love you actors who sit in the makeup chair for 5 hours i love you makeup artists i love you practical sets i love you puppetry i love you miniatures and bigatures

procreate drawins

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List of Elemental Abilities

Air/Wind

Aerokinesis -manipulate the air, wind, and gas.

Aeroportation - teleport using air/wind currents.

Air Mimicry - transform into a cloud of gas, fog, or mist.

Atmokinesis - manipulate the weather by mixing water, fire, earth, air, and lightning/electricity.

Deoxygenation - suck up all the oxygen from a place.

Lung Adaptation - breath anywhere

Wind Generation - create blasts of air.

Divine Winds Manipulation - create and control heavenly winds.

Dark Wind Manipulation - create and control eerie winds.

Earth

Geokinesis - control, manipulate, and reshape the earth at will.

Atmokinesis - control and manipulate the weather by mixing water, fire, earth, air, and lightning/electricity.

Crystallokinesis - manipulate minerals and crystals.

Ferrokinesis… manipulate metal at will.

Fraxikinesis - manipulate burnt matter.

Geo-Thermokinesis - manipulate, control, and create lava, magma and volcanoes.

Golem Creation - make golems out of inanimate materials like rocks, wood, plants, magma, etc.

Granulation… can turn things into sand.

Halokinesis - control and manipulate salt.

Hyalokinesis - control and manipulate glass.

Koniokinesis - manipulate and control dust particles.

Plassikinesis - manipulate and control all forms of plastic.

Psammokinesis - can control and manipulate sand.

Terrakinesis - control, manipulate and alter/reshape the surrounding terrain and landscape at will.

Terraportation - teleport via the earth and earth-based materials.

Sacred Earth Manipulation - Create, manipulate, control, reshape divine earth minerals.

Black Earth Manipulation - Create, manipulate and control tainted and evil earth minerals.

Fire

Pyrokinesis - create, control and manipulate fire, flame and heat.

Atmokinesis - control and manipulate the weather by mixing water, fire, earth, air, and lightning/electricity.

Fire Breath - breathe out flames.

Geo-Thermokinesis - manipulate lava, magma and volcanoes.

Heliokinesis - manipulate and control the sun and sunlight.

Hell-Fire Manipulation - Generate and control flames of hell.

Holy Fire Manipulation - Generate and control flames of Heaven.

Inflammation - burn things.

Melting - heat molecules to melt things.

Plasmakinesis - can control plasma.

Pyrotechnics - create fireworks.

Self-Detonation - explode self and reform.

Thermokinesis - create, control and manipulate heat.

Water

Hydrokinesis - manipulate and control liquid water and mold it into any desired shape or form.

Aquatic Adaptation - adapted to underwater living.

Aquatic Respiration - breathe underwater.

Atmokinesis- control and manipulate the various aspects of the weather by mixing water, fire, earth, air, and lightning/electricity.

Dehydration - absorb water.

Hydroportation - teleport across short or long distances through liquid water.

Water Mimicry - turn into liquid water.

Holy Water Manipulation - create, manipulate and control graceful waters.

Dark Water Manipulation - create, manipulate and control evil and dangerous waters.

Darkness

Umbrakinesis - can manipulate and control darkness or shadows.

Animated Shadow - Animate one’s shadow.

Light Absorption - block out light in an area.

Night Vision - see in the dark.

Sacred Darkness - create holy darkness.

Shadow Camouflage - be unseen in shadows.

Shadow Mimicry - become a shadow.

Umbrageous Teleportation - teleport via the shadows and darkness.

Electricity/Lightning

Quintessence Force -Can generate whitish-blue lightning that also contains pure life energy.

Electrokinesis - control, generate or absorb electric fields and shoot lightning bolts.

Activation & Deactivation - turn stuff on and off.

Positron Manipulation - control positrons, the antimatter counterpart to electrons.

Electrical Absorption - absorb electricity.

Electric Mimicry -transform entire body into a lightning-like being of pure electrical energy

Electrical Transportation - teleport with lightning.

Divine Lightning Manipulation - create and control the brightest lightning.

Black Lightning Manipulation - create and control the darkest lightning.

Energy

Dynamokinesis - manipulate existing energy.

Energy Blast - create blasts of energy.

Energy Emission - release energy.

Quintessence Force - create and manipulate unique form of electrical and life energy.

Mana Manipulation

Chi Manipulation

Electricity Manipulation

Energy Manipulation

Ice

Cryokinesis - control ice, snow and other forms of frozen water.

Freeze Breath - freeze things in solid ice.

Freezing - lower the temperature in kinetic atoms to freezing temperatures.

Frigokinesis - control snow either as precipitation or already on the ground.

Ice Beam - shoot beams of freezing energy.

Ice Generation

Light

Dark Light Manipulation - create the darkest light in existence.

White Light Manipulation- create sacred light from the divine.

Photokinesis - create and manipulate pure light.

Force-Field Generation - create protective shields of solid photons.

Invisibility - be unseen.

Laser Emission - bend light wavelengths to create lasers.

Light Absorption -absorb the light around you.

Light Generation - emit blinding light or glow in the dark.

Light Mimicry - take on the traits of light.

Photoportation - Teleport by using photons.

Projective Invisibility - turn other things invisible.

Evil Banish - Rid and banish all spirits of evil and black magic.

Light Manipulation

Weather

Atmokinesis - manipulate the various aspects of the weather by using water, fire, earth, air, and lightning/electricity.

Atmokinetic Resistance - immunity to all weather-based abilities and effects.

Atmokinetic Sensing - sense the future weather patterns.

Other

Aether Manipulation

Cosmic Manipulation

Gravity Manipulation

Nether Manipulation

Space-Time Manipulation

From Superpower Wikia. See their complete list of superpowers HERE.

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yall look at this shit ad*be is tryna pull now on ppl who have outdated software:

(note for context: i’m all for piracy, but in this case my copy of CS6 was downloaded years ago when they were giving it away to students. i got it totally legally.)

I was asked to post a favorite apid today and I can’t just choose one so have a Pretty Bee Appreciation Post!

Neon cuckoo bee, Thyreus nitidulus:

Photo by dianneclarke

Indian carpenter bee, Xylocopa tenuiscapa:

Photo by chiefredearth

Dilemma orchid bee, Euglossa dilemma:

Photo by sophiacf619

Checkered cuckoo bee, Thyreus caeruleopunctatus:

Photo by dianneclarke

Male valley carpenter bee, Xylocopa varipuncta:

Photo by dickwood

Sonoran bumble bee, Bombus sonorus:

Photo by kriseth7

Hunt’s bumble bee, Bombus huntii:

Photo by mlodinow

Cerulean carpenter bee, Xylocopa caerulea:

Photo by gancw1

Four-striped digger bee, Amegilla quadrifasciata:

Photo by orlandof