Astra Lun`s Art Blog

You are not Mithal

David Lynch plants a tree in Boiarka near Kyiv, 2009

Please, when you see something written in Cyrillic, don't assume right away that it's russian. Russian is not the only language that uses Cyrillic. There are also Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Mongolian.

It's a sensitive topic especially for us Ukrainians because russian language is a weapon. It's a colonial language, it's presented like one and only true slavic language, it erases and replaces other languages. Belarusian is literally on the verge of extinction because of russian. Ukrainian has been banned 134 times throughout history, it is still called a "village language", a dialect of russian. Russian colonialism is literally the reason why there are so many russian speaking people in Ukraine (I was one of them btw). Ukrainian is banned on russian occupied territories and people are getting in trouble or even killed for using it there, Ukrainian POWs in russian captivity are getting brutally beaten for speaking Ukrainian.

Like okay, I can get why there's this confusion, so here's a clue to understand that the language you're looking at definitely is not russian — the letter і. If you see ї (like i but with two dots) it's 100% Ukrainian. If you see j it's Serbian. Russian alphabet also doesn't have such letters as Ђ, Љ, Њ, Ў, Џ (dont confuse with Ц ). Yes, it's not always gonna be easy to detect that the language in front of you is not russian, but when you have trouble with it just ask or run it through any translation app and it'll probably tell you the language.

Hope this will be helpful.

Being Ukrainian in this world is like trying to build a card tower during an earthquake that just doesn't fucking stop. 

Sometimes the earthquake becomes less noticeable, and you manage to build a nice structure from the things you enjoy and keep your mental stability, but then at one moment the earthquake becomes stronger. Your card tower is now ruined, you suddenly feel a lot of rage or grief that's been building up all this time, you can't do anything because you're too overwhelmed and scared. Despite all of that, eventually you pull yourself together and start building the tower again. 

But the earthquake is still there. It is always there. It never ends and it feels like it won't ever end. People start gaslighting you that there's no earthquake or that it's not important compared to other earthquakes.

And it's a cycle I and every Ukrainian have been living in for 2.5 years now. Someone has lived in it since 2014.

I don't like to whine about it, because there are indeed people whose experience is worse than mine. But living like this is still mentally exhausting.

I miss the days when they could all be just silly beans

you're SO RIGHT!

he is the best string bean and it's so funny to draw him like that :D

Omg guys he's so romantic I think he's going to propose :^)

ATTENTION

This illustration now includes Scratch. Thank you for your attention.

fenders in a nutshell (it's funny, because it works both ways)

You forgot to give me something

Above image is a pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.

In honor of Dragon age veilguard news, here’s my Inquisitor as Ukrainian Polissya girlie from Rivne region 💅💅💅 (photo is from UA fashion week, spadok project)

Just for fun 👁👁

Also, I’m on cara now!