Darkness, blood, and age.

All right, so in case you hadn't noticed (I did drop hints).... I'm kind of a fan of dark, mysterious, vaguely vampiric things. Not all the things I like are like that, nor do I like all gothically influenced things... but let's just say, like a growing number of people, I see beauty in the dark.

So here's to that. Beauty in the dark.

Hades was always a favourite of mine.
I also made my own interpretation.

Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes
As best as I can tell, the source tracks to here.

I've actually been reading Picture of Dorian Gray. You'd be surprised how often people seem to totally abandon the numerous descriptions of Dorian in the book. Dorian is not merely described as pretty. His hair colour is specified as blond, and his looks are described as innocent, to the point that people don't believe anything against him because of it. He should never look like a 'cool beauty' type. This picture is by kakao-bean. I also enjoyed this portrait of the infamous young man, but chose to leave it out because it doesn't quite show the darkness as well as the above did. 

Pretty pretty pretty. By nayelemontre.

I believe the credits for this image are
contained within the image itself. However,
this reiteration isn't. So that's the link
I'm posting in relation to the image. 

{LINK}

by tatouji

Demon-ish thing.... link.

  My previous eerie post contained a lot of similar content. However, in this case I am focusing on things inspired by times long past- which will explain the amount of vampirism you'll find here.

This picture is not fanwork of anything. It's just plain old gorgeous. Art is by Kailyze.

By Tokala

Barnabas Collins.... 

Meiseki does the best Faust stuff!

'Lady Murder' by Somnicide

Madness

{link}

Vlad and Lacrimosa de Magpyr.... Discworld vampires! I'm currently in the middle of reading Carpe Jugulum. credit

Also, because I couldn't resist adding a
picture of everyone's favourite
coffee-addicted transvestite vampire- Mal.
Monstrous Regiment is awesome.
credit

And to round out our discworld extravaganza... Susan Sto Helit!
credit

The strange disconnect of people with food.

Aww, cute puppies and kitties!

We do a lot of things for our pets. We cuddle them and feed them and wash them and play with them. Some people dress them up in cute little dollie-style outfits, some people have portraits made of them. We treat them like we might do our children.

Which is not really an issue, don't get me wrong- I'm all for loving your puppy or your kitty. The issue arises when we hear about other places... like asia... where nobody sees puppies as any different from any other animal. So they get eaten... just like any other animal. And the pet lovers flip shit. How dare you treat animals like that!

Could you imagine eating this cutie?
credit for the image

Again, I have no issue with raising the standard on how we treat our food, and I wholeheartedly support not butchering animals just because we think they're tasty.... but here's the issue. We complain loudly about how evil people in asia eat dogs, cats, and dolphins while we happily consume factory-farmed meat, farm fresh! Sounds like some people need a bit of a reality check. And by some, I mean lots and lots of people.

Actually, from a blog post
by a vegan person,
hooraying the fact that
a dog meat festival got cancelled....

chicken farm, 

Photograph by LM Otero/AP

National Geographic

If images like the one on the right upset you, then how come the image on the left is shrugged off? Yeah, sure, chickens and pigs and such are 'food animals'. But does that mean they should be mistreated? Honestly, a hint... if it icks you out to think of your puppy there, you probably shouldn't be buying the product.

lexidh

So do me a favour. Before you buy that hot dog, imagine it was dogs that went into it instead of cows and pigs. Grab the veggie version, check where your meat comes from and how it's treated, and pay the things that die for your tasty meals a tiny fraction of the respect they deserve. okay?

The Bechdel test!

Ohhkay. So for those of you that don't know it, the Bechdel test is a measure of how male-centric we

Obviously, this movie passed.
Did we ever think it wouldn't?
(for the cavemen among us, that's Frozen)

are. Simply put, it asks whether, in any given movie, two named female characters speak to each other about something other than a man.

Sounds simple enough, but even some of the Harry Potter movies fail.... the books all pass, though, unless you don't count girls as women. There's also some debate as to groups including men being allowed.

And this one failed. So miserably.
There are about three female characters
in the entire series, and they basically
never talk to each other at all.
LOTR also fails, about as miserably.
All this is to prove
that a movie can be good and fail this test.

There's a lot of leeway in the 'man' thing, too, where people who want all movies to fail this count discussing male children as discussing men. And guess what? That eliminates a lot of conversations.

However, I'd like to point out that if you don't count children and group conversations, the 'reverse Bechdel' would be failed by a lot of movies too.  What's interesting there is that reading through the movie reviews on that website, even in movies where the Bechdel test is passed, it's usually passed long after the reverse is. One exception I'm almost sure of is Pride and Prejudice- I'm pretty sure it passes the Bechdel test with flying colours, although the women do talk about men a lot, and it may actually fail a reverse Bechdel.

If you look at the statistics, like here, though, what is much more embarrassing than the number that fail the test is the number that fail it utterly and completely, having less than two named female characters at all.

The stats here seem to be actually pretty okay. They could be better, but the fact is that 100% isn't the target here. A movie with a male main character is unlikely to pass the test, and that's fine. Not every movie has to have that much of a female presence. Granted, any movie not set in an all-boy's school with more than a few characters should probably have more than one named female character, but hey.

Despite being quite male-centric,
Amadeus (1984),
actually passed the test.

I'm pretty impressed by Hayao Miyazaki having 9/10 movies pass- although I shouldn't be, most of his main characters are female.

Lee Daniels' The Butler first came to my attention
because of the approximately ten seconds or Alan Rickman.
I'm impressed it passed- it has very few
female characters compared to female.

Here's another gender thing, though, on a random tangent. It is nearly impossible to find pictures of men in magazines. It's disproportionately women. Seriously. Look through a men's magazine, and most of the pictures? Sexy women, because that's what men want to see. And women's magazines? stylish women! Cooking? Usually a woman. The only place you'll find lots of men is sports... and gay men's magazines.

Fact is, the industry cranks out what it thinks people want, and it's usually right.  Men aren't really all that interested in female-centric movies, and yet women will mostly put up with male-centric ones so long as the plot's good.

Summary- Don't refuse to watch a movie just because it fails this test, but watch for how early in a movie two men have a conversation versus two women. And then watch how it's almost never 'ladies first'. Really, the aim should be about half-half.

Fanstuff!

So, I'm kind of a fan of fandom... I love being with people who, like me, get excited about fictional characters and people that may as well be fictional for all you're ever going to talk to them. So here's a toast of fandom.

Crossovers are always fun.  Labyrinthian Mario!

This person makes a whole pile of these
adorable 'fandom tea' labels.
See Luna Lovegood, and guess who
represents 'peach fever' tea! 

Princess Tutu was
one of the strangest animes
I've ever watched, but the
fanart it sparks is nothing
short of gorgeous.

It's an Adipose! Innit cute?

Havemercy is pretty much my favourite book of all time. It's also not nearly as popular as it ought to be. Here's one of the better fanworks I've seen of it... Royston, Hal, Thom, and Rook, from left to right.  Here's the original. I usually picture Royston with his hair kind of slicked back from his forehead, or perhaps brought into a low ponytail... and a slightly more prominent nose. Hal ought to have freckles on his nose. Thom's hair is likely to be less mussy, and I always pictured Rool with a slightly squarer jaw... mostly I have my own pictures in my head of how they are, which is the reason for 

This bit of Havemercy fanfiction literally made me cry.... and this one made me laugh. This one just made me coo. 

Havemercy fanfiction is consistently a lot better than average fanfiction.

JR!

Arya Stark.

Team Rocket! Artist  

We potterheads are a sentimental lot.
Artist: Kia Sue

Isn't Ciel pretty? Shoutyy

But which one is yours? linky ->

LOTR!

Originality in our modern age

Portal fan art by
 Lissa Treiman.

I haven't posted in a while... my apologies. Back now!

When nothing new can be found, where is creativity? Are we just rehashing old ideas at this point? Is the only invention left time travel and portals? Has every story been told? Do we just need to get more complicated? 

Are we just going to keep making our microchips into nanochips and our displays shinier? 

Stamp by a Deviant,
Sesquipedalianistic

What stories can we tell? Sherlock Holmes, Pride and Prejudice, Macbeth, the Odyssey, they've been written. We see new stories come in, like Harry Potter, and The Fault in Our Stars, but though they're good, they're good partially because they refer to older lore... but let's face it, so do the others I mentioned. None of them just sprang up from a void. The Odyssey was passed down through oral tradition, and surely grew with each rendition, so that really it had several authors. Macbeth draws inspiration from real life events. The very title Pride and Prejudice is a borrowed phrase from another book. This idea we have that we need to create alone is an offshoot of overextending copyright law. No one ever creates great things alone. We always have help.

A totally awesome library!
Here's where I found it.

So basically, people, keep writing, and reading. And tell the idiots that complain that your work is similar to theirs that great minds must think alike. 

And especially, don't be afraid to read books. And don't be afraid to think up derivatives of them, either. There is nothing wrong with being inspired by someone else. It's not stealing their idea. Really. More than one person can write a romance. Heck, more than one person can write a romance about a couple of transdimensional elves in puerto rico. Okay, maybe transdimensional elves is kind of stretching it. Just so long as it's not the same plot. Waitasec, please, someone tell me there's a romance about transdimensional elves in puerto rico somewhere out there. That would be awesome.

Credit goes to Calvin and Hobbes' creator
Bill Watterson for this gem.

As to art- is there another style to be discovered? In order to do something new, do we have to just get plain old ridiculous? I get 'question the current', but sometimes I wonder if modern artists are just incapable of finding anything sane that hasn't been done yet. We live in a world with a lot of other people, and more leisure time than we've ever had. We are increasingly aware that we aren't really that unique, and while that's sometimes reassuring, in a world that places such a premium on being special, it's also a bit intimidating. You don't make the history books by being like everyone else, especially in art, but no one's really that special any more. There's always someone better than you because there are billions upon billions of people on the planet, not to mention you aren't just competing with the living, you're also competing with the old masters! What could you possibly do that's better? No, you must do something that's different, new, to be special. But what is there to do? Again, the numbers are against you.

And yet, my favourite artists are often those who innovate not the what, but the how. Details are just as important as the concept, and though the modern art world has forgotten it, these people haven't. No, it's not commercial, low art to do something that's been done before your own way. It's not copying either. A lot of them come up with their own stories behind characters, get involved in rich fantasy worlds.

However, there is a danger to 'fanart'. At some point, instead of throwing massive creative juices into creating a really complicated place for yourself in someone else's pet universe, make your own characters! And appreciate other people who do, too. Take the time to get to know characters that don't belong to the Hunger Games or your favourite BBC series. Here's a few to get you started, including my very own Samuel Jensen. 

 

MistyTang and Grimreapette
are a team on deviantart...
Grimmy writes and Misty draws!
These two are their characters,
Mercutio and Cian. Space elves.

The Student Attention Chart is
the creation of LittlePurplePlums. 

I intended to put up a link to Canadian-rainwater's page. However, she's kind of... gone dark. Due to an unspecified event, she's taking a break from the internet. As a massive fan of hers, I'm disappointed that I won't have any more hilarious stuff from her. But as a person, I know she needs her time and has every right to take it. So here's hoping she'll be back soon. She will be missed.

My sister's on Etsy!

And here's just some stuff that's kind of new and refreshing in its own, quiet way.... just to drive home the point that sometimes originality is about sticking to an idea, not just doing the craziest thing you can think of.

[X]

This is an oil painting by Wayne Haag. We have a lot of new subject matter coming through, but there seems to be this weird belief,  in the art world, that fantasy is wrong to depict unless you're either surrealist or painting from really old myths. New stories are kind of categorized like fanart. You don't see work like this in a major art gallery. But why? It's certainly original, and skilful. it just isn't what people think should go there. Not the right kind of rebellious.

I'll grant you this is borderline kitchy.
But why is it that we see this as meaningless,
but these shapeless masses are labelled 'elevated'?

Lassie is an artist I admire greatly,
and consistently creates truly fantastic work.

Leonid Afremov is, unlike many of the artists
I've mentioned here, not an amateur.
He could potentially make it into a gallery.
But he'll never make history. But you know what?
That's okay.
Because someone will love his paintings.
They will mean a lot to that person.
And if this artist is anything like me, that's
quite enough.

I don't think I need a description here,
you can guess my opinion.
By Stephanie Pui-Mun Law