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Karma The Halflander

@karmathehalflander

She/her I post whatever I'm interested in at the time, mainly wings of fire, gregregor the overlander, good omens, Musical theater, and books I like. Also Venom now apparently? Don’t know where that came from but I have a sneaking suspicion this interest is going to last.

⚠️CONFIRMED✨️

DYLAN AND SLEEPER ARE CANONICALLY BROTHERS.

And you might say, we already knew that. Yes, fans and lovers of Symbrock have been saying it for years, but this is the first time it's been confirmed in a comic. After enduring criticism that they weren't shown as a family, the symbiote itself finally refers to them as his and Eddie's children.

"Leave your brother out of this."

Even though we got crumbs from Symbrock, I have to say this makes me very, very happy. 😭💖🙏

//downs entire cup of coffee ok. ok so uh. au where jeremy is a movie (movie!) actor who just landed his first major break as the male lead in a romcom with fellow co-star christine canigula, part-time actress, part-time broadway star, fulltime america's sweetheart. hollywood LOVES jeremiah heere, even if he's a lil overwhelmed by the sudden red carpets and paparazzi swarms. chloe works as head makeup stylist, brooke is in the costuming department, (CONT)

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sfhdkjJJSFHSDHFDSHHHH DAMN SUNNY BACK AT IT AGAIN WITH THE INCREDIBLE AUS IM GONNA YEET

  • i CANNOT BELIEVE michael mell does not know who jeremy heere Is because everybody knows who he is. the hype for the movie (which is named Play Rehearsal because why the fuck not) is A Lot and jeremy gains a dedicated fanbase who watches every episode of an obscure tv show he’s been in, digs up shots of him doing various theatre productions through college, and one (1) shaky hand camera video of jeremy dressed a door in a pre-school play. jeremy is charming and kind and just the perfect amount of shy that makes people fall in love. when he gets signed on for the movie, everybody goes nuts.
  • jeremy is really fucking happy because here he is!! filming a movie!! (MOVIE!!) with christine canigula (CHRISTINE!!). he really is an incredible actor and he and christine have fantastic comedic and romantic chemistry. he loves acting and he loves his job and usual stress/doubts aside, he’s loving working on this film
  • but also ACK the attention is really overwhelming. logically, he knows that it comes with the job, but he went from basically a nobody to Rising Star. jeremy blended in seamlessly throughout his childhood, almost a professional at being a background character you overlook, and now. he’s getting recognized when he goes out to do groceries. he loves his fans so much!!! but also it’s rather nervewracking!! he didnt think he’d start fantasizing about days where he could go out and not get noticed, but here he is. he just wants a donut.
  • when he brings this up to chloe, she tosses him a pair of sunglasses. brooke takes those sunglasses and gives him a pair of much cheaper much less inconspicuous Not Designer sunglasses. jeremy gets the concept and digs out an old faded hoodie from high school and a cap (because he’s watched the scene in ca:tws. it’s incognito time) and makes that his Going Out And God I Hope Nobody Notices Me outfit. despite making it look like an idiot, it actually works. 
  • until michael mell, the dude who doesn’t know who jeremy heere is cuz his media consumption is stuck several years back and even if he was watching movies from the present, isnt the type to give any fuck over hollywood/actor buzz. he’s just a guy who’s lost on the streets somewhere in los angeles and he’s never gonna make it to—oh nvm yo dude can i have some directions
  • it has been SO LONG since somebody’s looked at jeremy and just kinda looked at him like a normal dude. no eye widening. no asking for a picture. this guy just flashes a bright smile that’s totally movie worthy, thanks jeremy, and leaves.
  • thatd be the end of that but they just keep meeting. 
  • jeremy gets a coffee? oh hey it’s lost guy! (this is where michael introduces himself to jeremy. he’s a programmer and he’s a bit new around here and when michael shakes his hand jeremy swears he understands that bit in the script of Play Rehearsal about heartbeats and hitched breaths. jeremy introduces himself as jeremy. jeremy heere. he waits for the pin to drop, for the recognition to come, but it doesnt. michael just quirks an eyebrow and says, “alright then, james bond.”)
  • (they share a table at the coffee shop and end up talking for the entire afternoon)
  • 3am and jeremy’s at the corner store because Snacks and oh god hey it’s michael with a basket full or energy drinks oh god, what are you DOING. they criticize each other’s 3am food choices and it’s so much fun. the cashier stares at jeremy (Jeremy Heere) a little awestruck, but doesnt say anything. michael doesnt notice.
  • they finally exchange numbers when michael literally fucking runs into jeremy while theyre on location for filming and STILL. NOTHING. jeremy doesnt mind anymore and is just happy he’s got a friend who doesnt know or care about celebrity shit.
  • but then of course you cant get out scot free 100% of the time. paparazzi gets a shot of jeremy, in costume, looking dashing, the perfect romcom lead, laughing and smiling at an Unknown Man.

(”He isn’t my boyfriend, oh my god,” Jeremy says into his hands. “I literally just met Michael a few weeks ago. We’re friends. He’s really nice.”

“And you’re telling me,” Jenna says very slowly. “That he has no idea who you are?”

“I mean, he knows I’m Jeremy Heere but he doesn’t know I’m Jeremy Heere.“ Jeremy’s life is so surreal that that sentence can make sense. 

“Was he living under a rock?” Rich asks, disbelieving.

“Under a Gamecube, probably, I don’t know.”)

  • idk how long i wanna push michael not knowing but my point is that jeremy Really Likes michael and totally doesnt wanna scare him off. the jeremy michael knows is nerdy jeremy who likes video games and not celebrity jeremy who makes people swoon with perfect smiles. 
  • so jeremy doesnt Tell him. and michael says just figures that jeremy likes hanging out at really weird times and loves hoodies and caps and sunglasses and always looks over his shoulder because of his anxiety. oh the fun these two will have…

SECRECY!! JEREMY PINING BECAUSE HE FEELS THAT MAYBE HE MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO DATE MICHAEL IF HE’S A CELEBRITY TYPECAST FOR ROMANCES!!! POSSIBLE MEDIA SHITSTORMS!!! MICHAEL MELL THE CLUELESS PROGRAMMER!!!

THE POSSIBILITIES FOR THIS ARE ENDLESS BUT I NEED TO STOP THIS RIGHT NOW BC THIS IS TOO LONG. FUCK. THANKS FOR THIS AU WHICH WILL NOW HAUNT ME

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Y’all are cooking

Bro why do you keep insisting we try to disarm this genderbending trap? We literally mapped out this whole dungeon floor we can just walk around it...

Whoa watch it bud! If I hadn't caught you you would have fallen straight into that pit of tentacles! Good thing I stopped you when I did, huh?

Oh man if I was just a few minutes late that vampire baroness would have hypnotized you and made you her thrall, good thing you can always count on me, ey? Cmon let's get going, the next round's on you

YOOO FELLOW AROSPEC EPIC GAMERS

happy arospec awarness week!! this year, i bring You: beetles beetles beetles beetles - as just a few of the arospec identities (id draw more but i am. tired. always.) and the beetles say, to all You incredible people on all points of the aro spectrum: You are valid, You are incredible, You are wonderful and the world is a better place with You in it. never forget that.

[ID: Digital art of realistic beetles drawn in arospec color schemes. There’s an aromantic hercules beetle, a round demiromantic beetle, an alloaro weevil, and an aroace stag beetle. End ID]

its all 'be gay do crime' until a black person starts making allusions to drugs or sex or god forbid VIOLENCE and then it turns out nobody can handle anything more hardcore than downloading illegal torrents of hamilton

This post is about racism. This post is about racism and antiblackness. This post is not about how cool YOU are for doing crimes or about how much you hate 'antis' or how bad tesla suck. This post is about how ostensibly progressive white people will clutch pearls and moralize about not listening to rap or engaging with black art or culture because it seemingly condones drugs, or violence, or is overly sexual, while having no issue with those topics in other, non-black contexts. There are conversations to be had about the topics surrounding this but in the meantime the original post is One Sentence and I'm not convinced most of the commenters in the past few days even read it.

People on this website will really mock anti-vaxxers and flat earthers for ignoring scientists and getting their alternative facts from facebook, and then turn around and insist they know more history than historians and more archaeology than archaeologists because they read an unsourced tumblr post once

Is there a real life example of this?

It happens a lot.

I know it's bad but I kind of want to know more about the woman who thinks the Roman Empire never existed

Oh shit i believed the Leonardo Da Vinci one

Also why do people make these

What do you hope to gain

There are a lot of different misinformation dynamics at play here.  Only some are innocent, only some are malicious.  But that’s why it pays to fact-check things, because the innocent misunderstandings, the arrogant personal hypotheses stated as fact, and the malicious lies are all jumbled together.

  • Some of these are a misunderstanding or conflating of true facts.  The Da Vinci one goes here.  Many historians do believe that Leonardo da Vinci had a romantic/sexual relationship with his apprentice(s).  And it’s well-established that his apprentices modeled for some of his paintings.  But they did not model for any of his paintings of Jesus - which was the core point of the post that this fact came from, enjoying the irony.  So this isn’t true because it’s a conflation of several true facts into a false but understandable conclusion.
  • Some of these are just a victim of internet telephone.  The “Persephone’s daughter” and “fake Greek goddess” ones refer to Mespyrian, who was some teenager’s wattpad OC daughter of Persephone and Hades, that someone else on tumblr accidentally mistook as a real figure from Greek mythology.
  • Some of these come from people making their own conclusions about history, and then turning around and insisting that the experts therefore must be lying to you.  This is where it gets dangerous.  The “archaeologists broke the noses off Egyptian statues to hide the fact that they were African” one goes here.  Many Egyptian statues are missing their noses, so several years ago someone on the internet claimed that it was because archaeologists deliberately broke them off, and this gained a Lot of traction because it felt true and people wanted it to be true.  People overwhelmingly want to believe that they, ordinary citizens of the world with no special training, are actually smarter than the experts.  People love to believe that, so it’s very, very easy for people to decide the experts are stupid and clueless (the “History Hates Lovers” song, the thing about the dodecahedron or the Roman hairstyles or the leather burnishers) while salt-of-the-earth ordinary folk are smarter than those ivory-tower eggheads.  At worst, people decide the experts are maliciously hiding the truth about the world for their own gain (the Lovers of Valdaro one here is an example of this, but you also see this a lot regarding “all ancient cultures were feminist utopias until the Catholic Church invented misogyny and covered up the feminist past” type posts that are extremely popular with TERFs.)  This is the dynamic I’m comparing to anti-vaxxers and flat Earthers, and yes, this kind of anti-intellectualism is dangerous.
  • Some people are just trolls because they like lying on the internet and riling people up.  This cannot be discounted.  People do do this.  The tiktok woman who doesn’t believe in the Roman Empire and doesn’t believe that Vesuvius erupted is almost certainly a troll who likes the attention her wild false claims get.

It’s a combination of things, but it’s why you shouldn’t assume that historians are all old homophobic clueless idiots and only you, tumblr user persephonesmassivebadonkers or whatever, know the REAL truth.  Because that’s how you get Flat Earthers, but more pressingly, it’s how you get antisemitic conspiracy theories and transphobic radfem proclamations of We Need To Return To The Ancient Feminist Utopia (By Destroying All Trans People)(And, Usually, Abrahamic Religions). 

But also by believing easily-debunked falsehoods it makes genuinely well-meaning people easier to dismiss by bigots as Brainwashed By Those El Gee Bee Tees Who Will Lie Because They Want To Destroy Academia/Biological Sex/The Church.

Spreading misinformation on tumblr is an understandable consequence of the existence of the internet, but it’s not harmless and really ought to be challenged when it’s seen.

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unkillablemonsterqueen

And it’s not remotely helped by the fact there’s plenty of similar true stories that can be pointed to. Like, here’s a list of things: Brits in the 1800s used to eat Egyptian mummies, numerous gay relationships in history were called “friendships” by Christian historians, the Vatican is hoarding almost all history ever written and refuses to let anyone access it, the original biographies of the Sons of Liberty were all works of fiction (like Washington and the apple tree), Greek and Roman statues were painted but the people who discovered them found it garish so they stripped the paint off, DaVinci invented a tank, Lancelot is a fanfiction OC, and the Catholic Church was founded after numerous other Christian churches and proceeded to burn the holy books that didn’t support their version (like the Gospel of Judas, which establishes that the “betrayal” was Jesus’s plan because how was he supposed to die as planned, and they plotted it together). It’s easy to believe bullshit when the truth is just as rank.

This is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about: confidently firing off a mix of half-remembered and out-of-context factoids with “lies and coverups in history!!!” to make them seem like they’re correcting the record rather than reducing a mix of truth, common misconceptions, conspiracy theories, misunderstandings, and poor reporting to pithy one-liners. Let’s go through them.

Brits in the 1800s used to eat Egyptian mummies,

It's complicated. There's definitely a grain of truth to this, but it's not quite what the common narratives suggest. For example, eating mummies was a Medieval thing more than it was a Victorian thing; Victorians did "Scientific" mummy-unwrapping parties, but they didn't then eat them - they were collectible antiquities. For another, the mummies used by Victorians for paint were rarely ancient Egyptian humans. I'll let @thatlittleegyptologist take this one because they've talked about it. A lot. Like a lot. So often.

numerous gay relationships in history were called “friendships” by Christian historians,

It's complicated. Have historians in the past denied that their favorite historical figures could possibly be gay? Absolutely. But people who were romantically and sexually involved with each other in the past very often did call each other "friend." (Or, in ancient Egypt, "brother"). Even husbands and wives would call each other "friend." (it's midnight and I am blanking on how to search for sources that show this but I have transcribed 18th century letters and diaries, I have seen this.) Like, while historical squeamishness and denial of gay relationships has been a thing... the modern assumption that friendship cannot possibly ever include any gay stuff is also not helping. And heteronormatively taking words at face value is somewhere in between. It's sometimes malicious, but you have to give space for simple hetero brain too. And give space for all the queer and queer-affirming historians working in the field. And for people like Oscar Wilde who were arrested for sodomy and the Ancient Greeks who were Ancient Greek so it's hardly like anyone's denying that, even if their interpretation was that it was Bad. It's not cut and dry.

the Vatican is hoarding almost all history ever written and refuses to let anyone access it,

This one isn't actually complicated, it's just a bizarre misunderstanding (generous interpretation) or an Evangelical conspiracy theory (less generous interpretation) of what the Vatican Apostolic Archive, formerly known as the Vatican Secret Archive, is. They're not "hoarding almost all history ever written" (how would that work?). It's an archive of the Church's and the Vatican's records, accounting, correspondence, declarations, decisions, and other various affairs. Over the past several hundred years of dutiful documentary-keeping, that does add up to a lot of history about the development of European politics, culture, and colonization! There are in fact two archives; one which has been accessible to scholars since 1881, and one which is owned unilaterally by the Pope and only extremely rarely opened for any sort of access to outsiders. John Paul II actually made it easier for researchers to access those archives, though "easier" does not mean "easy" and is still very much at the Pope's discretion. However, they are archives pertaining to the Pope's and Church's affairs, not all of human history.

the original biographies of the Sons of Liberty were all works of fiction (like Washington and the apple tree),

True! But also a little complicated. The story about Washington and the cherry tree is complete fiction, and we know who to blame for it: Mason Locke "Parson" Weems, who wrote his famous biography of Washington right after Washington died and the nation was clamoring for tributes to him. He was kind of shameless about writing for the masses things that would sell. But at the same time, it was part of the myth-making of the new nation, part of a very common process at the time of nearly deifying Washington. But it is also true that we do in fact have a lot of letters and diaries written directly by these guys. We don't need to rely on Weems for fanciful stories about them, even if they have entered into the mythology-building of the US as a nation.

Greek and Roman statues were painted but the people who discovered them found it garish so they stripped the paint off,

Have you ever seen what happens to painted stone when left out in the elements over time? The paint chips off. Being exposed to the elements or buried in the dirt for hundreds or thousands of years does a number on the painted exterior of a statue. Here's a Jesuit scholar from 1913 lamenting this: "It is a notorious fact that the remains of colour fade very fast from marbles that are exposed to the light after centuries of burial and concealment. It is the universal experience of classical archaeologists. A French explorer describes some colours vanishing from sarcophagi found at Carthage "comme de la fumée" [like smoke]. Add to this the perfectly intelligible cleaning consequent on first discovery in the earth, and the still more disastrous and less pardonable washings with acid that, until recent years, were the fate of all classical statues. Even still another risk has to be remembered, the taking of casts […] Add these fates together, and say whether their total does not offer an explanation for a prejudiced view." Honestly, as Gisela M. A. Richter (1944) says, "The fact that any color at all remains is really more remarkable than that it has disappeared in the majority of cases." Greek and Roman statues, probably even marble statues, were painted! Yes! But there was probably little paint remaining even when the Renaissance sculptors and art collectors got ahold of them. And while the discoverers deliberately stripping off the paint because they decided it should not have been there is one potential reason (note the reference to acid-washing), and the pure white marble was a very ideologically-loaded Enlightment-era aesthetic highlighting the purity of the form, and 1700s-1800s English archaeologists and antiquarians had vicious debates over whether the marble statues were painted like the fate of their cultural hegemony rested on it, "removing the paint for its garishness" was not even close to the primary reason the colored paint does not remain. These are some resources about the Gods in Color exhibition that did experimental reconstructions of the colors of some statues.

DaVinci invented a tank,

Leonardo da Vinci drew designs for many devices, including a war machine that does resemble a modern tank! It's frequently described (with hedging descriptions) like "has been seen as a prototype of a tank." But there's no evidence that it was ever built, and it's unclear if the wheels and gear system would have worked. Can he be said to have "invented a tank"? I guess it depends on your definition of "invented."

Lancelot is a fanfiction OC,

This is either a flippant or deeply disingenuous way to describe the origins, evolution, and recording of King Arthur mythology, its use in literature and nationalist propaganda, and the way this is different from the way fanfiction interacts with a canon. @chimaerakitten knows much more about this than I do.

and the Catholic Church was founded after numerous other Christian churches and proceeded to burn the holy books that didn’t support their version (like the Gospel of Judas, which establishes that the “betrayal” was Jesus’s plan because how was he supposed to die as planned, and they plotted it together).

Ohhhh boy it's complicated. I am out of energy and by god it is late but there is a reason that books and books and books have been written about the history of Christianity, the early schisms, the creation of the canon, Gnosticism, and the origins of the Catholic Church.

Basically: if it can be summed up in one sentence as a "gotcha!" it is probably More Complicated Than That.

OP, you deserve many medals for not simply having many of the replies to this post become your supervillain origin story. Sympathy from the very bottom of my soul.

Meet the Mona Lisa of the Prado, the earliest known copy of Da Vinci’s best portrait. Similarity in the undersketch of the painting indicates that this was very likely painted concurrently with the original Mona Lisa, by a student of Da Vinci.

There is much controversy in the art world over the question of whether or not to clean the fragile Mona Lisa, but her sister has been restored and some fairly odd later alterations removed to show the original vibrant colors and lighting. Some details, such as the sheerness of her shawl and the pattern on the neckline of her dress, have become utterly obscured in the original, but in the restored copy they’re perfectly clear.

It blows my mind a little bit to look at these two sisters side-by-side and imagine how much vivid detail could be hiding in the Mona Lisa under 500 years of rotten varnish. 

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theatre-whovian

THE COPY HAS EYEBROWS

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lalaland1212

Your response to a beautiful piece of artwork done by Leonardo Da Vinci himself is “SHES GOT EYEBROWS”. Alright. All intelligent life has been lost.

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vastderp

Yo Snooty McSnotwhine, the Mona Lisa’s vanished eyebrows have been the subject of debate and analysis in the art expert community for hundreds of years, long before your parents squirted water at each other from across the clown car and then honked their bicycle horns to indicate they really wanted to make a smug, insufferable little clown baby together. 

this continues to be the best reply to a criticizing comment on this site

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