/SCREAMS FOREVER
I see your knitted octopus and raise you a needle-felted squid
YESSSSSS
(Source: jackutter)
#when a case goes awry and all of a sudden someone is trying to have sherlock deported #and so he and joan get gregson to get a friend to backdate their marriage certificate #and then the state of new york is like HA NICE TRY WE ARE SENDING THE INS TO DO A HOME VISIT #and the case worker shows up and sees the two of them in their natural habitat and is like oh no i get it this is real #and leaves #and joan just stands there #stunned #and pleased obviously but mostly stunned because who thought it would be easy? #and sherlock comes back from seeing the lady out and bounces on the balls of his feet and is all #see watson! i told you that practicing kissing was an ineffective use of our time when there’s still a murderer out there! #joan just narrows her eyes and says ‘i said that.’ and ignores the way he shrugs and says #’ah.’ and seems suspiciously pleased with himself
(Source: manueluv)
Paul Auster (via picadorbookroom)
I wonder if Paul Auster has been to one recently, though.
Libraries have actually become, in the US at least, de facto homeless shelters and centers for the mentally ill, as well as a resource for those needing childcare as well as the unemployed seeking work. There’s now signs on some of them in New York barring people from bringing ‘large packages’ which basically means ‘homeless people cannot bring their life’s belongings in here’—but they allowed it for almost a decade as homelessness in New York reached epic proportions. There’s actually very few places in American life so of this world, more than a library. Most public libraries are where you can see what is really going on for most Americans in a way you won’t ever see on the news or in a television show, or even in most fiction or nonfiction. And it is to the credit of most librarians that they continue to operate, despite budget cuts, the outlandish depravity of austerians and privitization mongrels. So, let’s not treat libraries like delicate flowers or temples withdrawn from the concerns of the world. They’ve shown themselves to be much tougher than that. Let’s instead make them what they should be, a better thing than what they’ve had to become—and look to what has been laid at their feet as a map to what our country really needs from its government services.
(via alexanderchee)
CHUNG-CHUNG!
I have said more than once that I think there is a dynamite television show to be made, Parks & Rec style, about people who work in a public library.
(By Parks & Rec style, I don’t mean mockumentary — though that could work — but I mean P&R’s fundamental optimism. Parks & Rec is a show that fundamentally believes government can be a force for good, that the people who work in government largely care deeply and want to make things better, even if they don’t agree about the best way to do that. A show about libraries that takes it as given that libraries are one of mankind’s greatest achievements and that we can do great things could be amazing, if it was also about how sometimes adults won’t move to let children sit at the front of a performance because “that’s not fair, I was here first,” or how patrons want you to help them find photos of genital warts so they can figure out if that’s what their boyfriends have, or complain because they borrowed a book on pickup techniques and “bitches still won’t talk to me.” [All true stories.])
(Source: whimsylibrarian)
A commission for a national summer reading program with the theme “Make Waves at Your Library” — they wanted a big god rising from the sea, and since I do animals much better than humans, I persuaded them to take Capricorn the sea-goat instead of Neptune or something like that. Now that it’s actually out in the library, I can post it here!
Compositionally this was a throwback to the old days when I did a lot of cover art—the top had to be dead space for text, and I had to put in so much bleed on the waves that Capricorn looks smaller than he actually came out on the printed posters. (The old skills you learn are never wasted…) Still, came out pretty well, I’ve gotten lots of great feedback from librarians across the country. - Ursula Vernonthis right here is pretty much what I want to be when I grow up.
So I’m in no way fluent in Italian (read: Napolitan), but after three months I’ve managed to pick up on a few neat linguistic-y things, although this has to do just as often with multilingual exchanges as with Italian itself. Here are a few.
A common mistake I’ve noticed Italians making is mixing up English pronouns: he/she, his/her. It’s something I never really understood, cuz I haven’t heard french folk do stuff like that, and pronouns in the respective languages (lui/lei, il/elle) aren’t any more distinct from one another than they are in English.
The formal ‘you’ in Italian is Lei, a homophone of ‘she,’ and is conjugated like this single, third-person pronoun! This kinda blew my mind, after coming to understand the French formal ‘vous’ (plural, 2nd-person) to be the way everyone did things. Like, it just makes sense to denote respect by referring to someone as if they were multiple people, right? I always related it in some way to the royal ‘we.’ So to instead refer to someone in the third person (arguably as a lady???) was pretty gestalt-shifty. And cool. And helpful, cuz the conjugation tends to be easier.
Many Italians speak French quite well, given the proximity of the countries and general similarity between languages. But what no one warned me of was just how awesome it sounds when they speak it. Like, distractingly, internal screaming, Out Of Cheese Error-inducingly hot. Which is the weirdest thing because the Italian accent for English is kinda goofy, if anything?? Also cuz I’d never noticed the difference with the Italian folks I’d met in Paris, so maybe I just really miss speaking French (or maybe any language when I feel we speak at the same level? :I)
Cazzo is a beautiful catch-all cuss word on par in usage and flexibility with ‘fuck’ in English. For some reason, though, I always transliterate as ‘katsu,’ like the Japanese dish, so I get a little confused seeing it in writing.
On several occasions I’ve passed people talking what I supposed was Korean, only to double-take at the group of Italians. It’s hard to say for sure, since I don’t really speak either, but I’m thinking what I’m misrecognizing is the Napolitan dialect. It’s sounds a lot…thicker than the proper national language, more ‘sh’ sounds and open(?) vowels. No idea what it means for whatever it is i’m learning to speak, but I gotta admit that it’s starting to feel more natural pronouncing it as “shkooz’” rather than, ‘scusi/a.’
Help I’ve been playing this game for like three days now.
And if it doesn’t look like anything when you click that link, give it a minute. I swear there’s more to the box than it seems. (It’s bigger on the inside, truly.)
Neat game, very satisfying. Recommended!
Well if this isn’t just an absolute delight.
