South American Smooching Dragon

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
nyancrimew
foone

ADHD in the era of the personal brand is wild.

You get into a thing and hyperfocus harder than anyone ever has hyperfocused. Dozens, hundreds of posts across multiple platforms. You discover things no one knows, you create many new things, you intangibly weave your very digital soul into the threads of this niche thing’s fabric. You are now known as “The Thing Guy” on several websites (despite not being a guy). People screenshot it and crosspost it to other websites, and the comments are like “OH IT’S THE THING GUY AGAIN!”

three weeks later, you drop it like a stone. You still want to do it, but you have no more motivation, and you can’t force yourself to touch it again. Your brain just goes “bored now” and moves on. 

Mere months later someone goes “hey, aren’t you The Thing Guy?”. You are suddenly smoking a cigarette. You take a deep drag. “Used to be, long ago… back in March”. They look at the calendar. It’s halfway through May. 

dzamie
officialdamonalbarn

where is that renaissance painting with those two fellers and a giant fucking random skull on the floor that looks like it was accidentally stretched out in photoshop

officialdamonalbarn

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THANK YOU

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hickeywiththegoodhair

somebody please explain

iamthecoffeebadger

Someone once told me it’s like that because it was designed to be hung in a stairwell so the skull pops out as you walk past.

iwilltrytobereasonable

…I guess it works but you have to be at a pretty sharp angle

caecilius-est-pater

There was a whole trend at one point where artists would include something in their paintings (usually a skull, for whatever reason) that’s super distorted in just the right way so that it looks normal if you hold the painting up to a convex/concave mirror. I have absolutely no idea why. But I think that’s what’s going on here.

crtter

In case anyone’s curious, here’s what it looks like when you walk past it irl:

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It does have a 3D effect to it! It’s pretty neat, guess it would be even more impressive to people from the 14th century.

midnightvoyager

honestly, people just looking at the skull are missing the real deal here

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You can read any implied text you see in this thing, even the book, that’s how detailed it is. Look at the painting on those letters!

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jesus christ you’re just showing off now, Hans!

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HANS OH MY GOD

anyway, the skull apparently had some meaning about the transcendence of death, you can only see it clearly when you can’t see the world clearly and vice versa, but man, I’m all about the detail in this guy’s shit

queen-sammie

No, I think you’re missing the real deal here

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anais-ninja-bitch

as an art historian, i think this is the best post on tumblr

punkitt-is-here
cumpriest

so funny to me when white american christians are like “ooh i incorporate my religious trauma into my art and thats why i draw these stained glass gothic church gold multi eyed reneissance sculpture angels agnus dei” like i know your protestant southern california ass didnt have any of that. go make some art about this

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deoidesign

ok

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arsonsara

Damn way to read the assignment and go above and beyond.

sunshine-tattoo

the bleakness and sanitized feel of most American protestant churches really is an underused medium.

dzamie
changelingsandothernonsense

New Ea-nāṣir lore just dropped and I don't know how to feel about that. I hate the meme but the guy having thugs coming after him for bad copper sales is perfect.

teal-deer

Wait wait WAIT

As someone who hard agrees with all your tags re: tired of the meem

BUT who is also invested in antiquities

Is it possible for you to drop the new lore

changelingsandothernonsense

So the building in Ur where the infamous tablet was found (1 “Old Street” Ur Excavations VII) was actually full of similar tablets, all detailing how badly this guy's deals went. All of these tablets were collected and put into storage at the British Museum. Typically this kind of thing gets forgotten about, many of these tablets have been sitting there for a century, untranslated or partially translated.

The Nu Tabletum

This was recently partially translated and it's incredibly fragmentary, but it's a letter from the man himself reassuring a customer in Larsa about a bad shipment (a lot of goods were missing). He is upset that the customer sent thugs to collect (which is located in a different tablet). In turn, he sends his own to the customer's home. They are to make offerings at the temple of Šamaš together to symbolically "smooth things over". They are taking an oath.

He later goes on to blame the customer for the missing ingots. He (Ea-nāṣir) decided to employ a third party to deliver said ingots to the customer (all the way in the next city-state in the Sumerian cultural sphere). It seems like the third party either stole or got into a fight with the customer over the goods.

Ea-nāṣir now has to haul his ass to Larsa to deal with this personally. There's a lot of "Why don't you believe me?" "They don't listen to me!" "Please don't send-" going on in the tablet. But from what I can gather it looks like this peace offering (making an oath at the temple of Šamaš) broke down too. Everyone is blaming each other for the missing copper ingots and now the man himself has to take the three-day journey to sort out this issue.

We have a name for one of the thugs: Mr. Shorty (kurûm). He seems to be a bit scary.

The man from Dilmun got kicked out of the Merchant's Guild for a reason, he's had this problem before with copper shipments from Elam. Either he's the world's worst judge of character or he's embezzling, and badly. This is his side hustle stage where he's selling everything from used clothing to speculating (badly) on real estate. He may have dabbled in money lending too. He's your classic failed finance bro.