![jhameia:
ardhra:
thesavagesalad:
madamethursday:
[Image: A dark skinned Desi woman in a steampunk outfit with a bright teal and gold collared choli (midriff bearing top) and pants that end in spats with a bright red and gold cloth that wraps around the character from shoulder to waist at knee length reminiscent of a dupatta with a black hat, gold colored pointed toe shoes, with a large choker-like necklace with green jewels, dangling green jewel earings and a jeweled green and gold bindi. She is holding a cigarette in one hand with a speech bubble that says, “Well, shit”.]
torayot:
nextian:
shoomlah:
Multiculturalism for Steampunk is starting up a weekly art challenge, and it looks promising. SO EXCITED. I’ve had a bunch of ideas for non-Western steampunk outfits floating around in my head, and it’s nice actually having a weekly deadline to motivate me to finish some of them.This is pretty subtle in its steampunkery (read: no extranneous metal bits), but I was just trying to bring in a few western/Victorian elements to traditional Indian clothing- legomuttoned sleeves, the double breasted, collared choli, and adapting the churidar into buttoned spats.…Also a sweet hat.-C
I think there are some colonialist questions that get raised when you incorporate specifically British Victorian elements of couture into Indian fashion? A few?
Buuuuuuut I would fight a man on a grizzly bear for this lady’s comic.
I am so glad you said this. I thought I was alone in this. British Empire, anyone? Company Rule? British Raj?
Dear internet, I shan’t assume that you all know about the British Empire. I know not everyone has the same education and it’s problematic to assume this.
But know that British rule in India lasted from around 1757 to about 1948, and that the relationship between the coloniser and colonised is extremely complicated, and still very much has real lived effects today. Sure, the outfit and character look beautiful, but I just don’t think you can go around mashing up Victorian fashion with Indian clothing just for surface steampunk elegance without encountering some problems. I can appreciate the visual qualities, but the history and meaning causes some concern.
/inb4 people start screeching that I am ~*oversensitive*~ and can’t enjoy anything :-{D
Reblogging for Torayot’s commentary. They are so NOT oversensitive.
While the idea is nice, since the artist is a white/non-Indian/non-Desi person, it is something to think about before uncritically praising this picture.
I love non-European steampunk (art and literature), but it seems like so many people think throwing in Victorian English/U.S.ian/Western motifs, clothes, and other things is somehow a requirement, that it doesn’t count as steampunk if there aren’t spats or Western style hats and other things, that it doesn’t count if it doesn’t take place in the 1860’s to 1930’s in the West.
And this is problematic given the history of colonialism and it’s ongoing impact on the world.
You know, not gonna lie- this is mega pretty. I see that the artist is trying here and it is great the steam punk is going beyond being white. But you gatta be incredibly mindful of incorporating Victorian elements to an identity which was harmed by the Colonialism for centuries. It’s possible to do steam punk without it being eurocentric in styles and all and ugh uhg
The commentary summarises my feels better tbh. But I do like this picture.
Yeah, this all just assumes that Victorian fashions didn’t already influence Indian norms of dress & comportment, which they did in a big way. And the British appropriated the fuck out of the cultures of all the societies they colonised. Where do you think they got their fabrics from? What exactly do you think “paisley” is?
Also, nobody would ever wear a choli with chudidar paijama like that.
When I saw “Multiculturalism for Steampunk” that was ALL I NEEDED TO KNOW. Considering that the challenger’s idea of “multiculturalism” appears to be “APPROPRIATE MIX UP ALL THE THINGS! … respectfully” (her idea for a Cixi cosplay involved a corset on a hanfu, for chrissakes), I’m very not surprised that a white artist inspired by this challenge would put together Victorian English and Indian fashions together in a way which is so obviously Euro-inspired.
I wish I saw more steampunk that DIDN’T immediately scream out “INSPIRED BY EMPIRE” but hey.
Anyway, commentary is all awesome. <3
“the sun never set on the british empire, because god didn’t trust us in the dark.” - via warren ellis, source unconfirmed
it is nice to see brown skin instead of just brown suits and beards. i get tired of steampunk nearly always manifesting as ‘put some brass on it’, it being sepia, old timey, and the white west. always the lone ranger, never zorro. always industrial, never post-slavery. always victorian, never baroque. always tesla, never da vinci. (or archimedes! steampunk odyssey, plz.)](http://www.tumblr.com/photo/1280/ultralaser/16815332616/1/tumblr_lymqqtM6Qa1qz5g4u)
[Image: A dark skinned Desi woman in a steampunk outfit with a bright teal and gold collared choli (midriff bearing top) and pants that end in spats with a bright red and gold cloth that wraps around the character from shoulder to waist at knee length reminiscent of a dupatta with a black hat, gold colored pointed toe shoes, with a large choker-like necklace with green jewels, dangling green jewel earings and a jeweled green and gold bindi. She is holding a cigarette in one hand with a speech bubble that says, “Well, shit”.]
Multiculturalism for Steampunk is starting up a weekly art challenge, and it looks promising. SO EXCITED. I’ve had a bunch of ideas for non-Western steampunk outfits floating around in my head, and it’s nice actually having a weekly deadline to motivate me to finish some of them.
This is pretty subtle in its steampunkery (read: no extranneous metal bits), but I was just trying to bring in a few western/Victorian elements to traditional Indian clothing- legomuttoned sleeves, the double breasted, collared choli, and adapting the churidar into buttoned spats.
…Also a sweet hat.
-CI think there are some colonialist questions that get raised when you incorporate specifically British Victorian elements of couture into Indian fashion? A few?
Buuuuuuut I would fight a man on a grizzly bear for this lady’s comic.
I am so glad you said this. I thought I was alone in this. British Empire, anyone? Company Rule? British Raj?
Dear internet, I shan’t assume that you all know about the British Empire. I know not everyone has the same education and it’s problematic to assume this.
But know that British rule in India lasted from around 1757 to about 1948, and that the relationship between the coloniser and colonised is extremely complicated, and still very much has real lived effects today. Sure, the outfit and character look beautiful, but I just don’t think you can go around mashing up Victorian fashion with Indian clothing just for surface steampunk elegance without encountering some problems. I can appreciate the visual qualities, but the history and meaning causes some concern.
/inb4 people start screeching that I am ~*oversensitive*~ and can’t enjoy anything :-{D
Reblogging for Torayot’s commentary. They are so NOT oversensitive.
While the idea is nice, since the artist is a white/non-Indian/non-Desi person, it is something to think about before uncritically praising this picture.
I love non-European steampunk (art and literature), but it seems like so many people think throwing in Victorian English/U.S.ian/Western motifs, clothes, and other things is somehow a requirement, that it doesn’t count as steampunk if there aren’t spats or Western style hats and other things, that it doesn’t count if it doesn’t take place in the 1860’s to 1930’s in the West.
And this is problematic given the history of colonialism and it’s ongoing impact on the world.
You know, not gonna lie- this is mega pretty. I see that the artist is trying here and it is great the steam punk is going beyond being white. But you gatta be incredibly mindful of incorporating Victorian elements to an identity which was harmed by the Colonialism for centuries. It’s possible to do steam punk without it being eurocentric in styles and all and ugh uhg
The commentary summarises my feels better tbh. But I do like this picture.
Yeah, this all just assumes that Victorian fashions didn’t already influence Indian norms of dress & comportment, which they did in a big way. And the British appropriated the fuck out of the cultures of all the societies they colonised. Where do you think they got their fabrics from? What exactly do you think “paisley” is?
Also, nobody would ever wear a choli with chudidar paijama like that.
When I saw “Multiculturalism for Steampunk” that was ALL I NEEDED TO KNOW. Considering that the challenger’s idea of “multiculturalism” appears to be “
APPROPRIATEMIX UP ALL THE THINGS! … respectfully” (her idea for a Cixi cosplay involved a corset on a hanfu, for chrissakes), I’m very not surprised that a white artist inspired by this challenge would put together Victorian English and Indian fashions together in a way which is so obviously Euro-inspired.I wish I saw more steampunk that DIDN’T immediately scream out “INSPIRED BY EMPIRE” but hey.
Anyway, commentary is all awesome. <3
“the sun never set on the british empire, because god didn’t trust us in the dark.” - via warren ellis, source unconfirmed
it is nice to see brown skin instead of just brown suits and beards. i get tired of steampunk nearly always manifesting as ‘put some brass on it’, it being sepia, old timey, and the white west. always the lone ranger, never zorro. always industrial, never post-slavery. always victorian, never baroque. always tesla, never da vinci. (or archimedes! steampunk odyssey, plz.)
//why would you do that//?
Welcome to @theellenshow! todays topic? Kristen Bells inability to handle her emotions! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5jw3T3Jy70&sns=em #slothpluskristenequalslove
“you can paint over me but my anger will still remain.”
truth.
aaaaand ^ WE’RE JUST GOING TO NOT MENTION THIS ONE AT ALL.
And, apparently, the USA’s invasion and annexation of half of Mèxico is already forgotten.
Aaron McGruder should have a tumblr. I feel him and a lot of people I interact with would get along quite nicely.
Reblogging this for tranziet.
i love this with a very large portion of my being
i really miss the boondocks comic strip …
I liked the comic more than the cartoon. (Except for the episode about the ‘itis. That was hilarious!)
In 1940, Life magazine published a short photo essay focused on a little boy in Liberty County, Ga., who was about to undergo a blood test. Keats was struck by the sweet images of the child, and cut the group of photographs out of the magazine. That little boy was the inspiration for Keats’ character Peter, the African-American protagonist of The Snowy Day and six books that followed. (via ‘The Snowy Day’: Breaking Color Barriers, Quietly : NPR)
This is called Holi (or Festival of Colours) usually done in India or Pakistan and I definitely wanna be a part of it one day :D
Oh gosh Arthur, the puns you have committed..
Mythursday Returns: Perseus, Part 2: Shaft in Africa: This Time, It’s Not Thursday
When last we left our hero, he had just beheaded the dread Medusa and escaped from that scrape with the help of
his friend, an ape named Ape.magical items from benevolent gods.One might imagine he would immediately fly back with his prize to rescue his mother from marrying a king, but in fact he skirts the coast of
darkestmost fictional Africa.As he flies, blood from Medusa’s head drips into the ocean, turning plants in the Red Sea to stone, inventing coral the world over! Amazing! He flies over the Libyan desert, and dripping blood turns sand into
stonepoisonous snakes for some reason! He encounters the Titan Atlas, holding up the sky at the edge of the world, and feeling pity for him, turns him to stone with the Gorgon’s head, simultaneously creating the Atlas mountains and huge problems for Herakles continuity!And as he’s flying this ridiculously Family Circus-style circuitous route around Africa, he makes his way to Ethiopia, where there is a princess…IN TROUBLE!
Cassiopeia, queen of Ethiopia and wife of Cepheus, had dared to say she was more beautiful than the Nereids, the mermaid attendants of Poseidon. Here is a mythological tip: do not ever say out loud “I am Xer than Y” where X is anything even remotely positive and Y is a figure with magical powers or someone who might be giving tugjobs thereto.
Because Poseidon sent a giant-ass monster to destroy Ethiopia and I think we can all agree they are still feeling the effects even today. An oracle told Cepheus that the monster could only be appeased if Cepheus chained his daughter Andromeda to a rock as a sacrifice. Which he does.
The good news is, there’s a hero with a bag full of magic powers doing doughnuts around the Cape of Good Hope who is not willing to let a hot naked princess get eaten (I hope was the intention?) by a whale. Look, the point of the story is this: Perseus kills the monster and now everyone who was part of this story gets turned into stars. This is true; look at the sky, they’re there.
At any rate, you would think Perseus would now go back and save his mother. No. He stays to marry the princess. The bad news is, Andromeda was supposed to marry her evil uncle Phineus. You would think this engagement would have been voided by the whole blood sacrifice to a monster thing, but apparently not.
So Phineus and his cronies attack Perseus and Andromeda at their wedding. But Perseus doesn’t even give a shit. He grabs Medusa’s head from his bag, gets his stone on, gets his bone on, and flies back with his new wife to Seriphos, leaving the castle in Ethiopia with some new uncle-themed statues.
At this point, who even knows how long Perseus has been gone? I don’t. Long enough that he’s just in time to stop his mother from getting force-married to Polydectes! It was very much like the final scene of a modern romantic comedy, except instead of Hugh Grant making an impassioned speech to the bride, it was Perseus murdering the groom with a magical monster head.
Look, what I’m trying to say is that Dictys is the Fisherman King of Seriphos now.
Perseus and Andromeda went on to Tiryns, where they founded Mycenae, which is kind of a big deal. They also had hella children, who a few generations later produced Herakles, of whom you may have heard. Perseus returned all his magic weapons to the gods and gave Medusa’s head to Athena in appreciation for her help. She subsequently put the head on the aegis, her magical goatskin breastplate (or shield sometimes). So that’s good.
One last thing: after his adventures, Perseus took part in funeral games for a friend and threw a discus just, like, WAY too hard. It flew into the crowd and killed the shit out of an old man who was sitting there. That man: Acrisius, Perseus’s grandfather, killed by Danaë’s son, as foretold.
MORAL: Oracles ain’t nothin to fuck with.
I looked outside and saw some stars. The story checks out.
(by d|t*)
Brenna the Japanese sea lion is terrible at jump rope (she’s okay at four square though).
Melvin the great auk is never certain as to whether or not people call him “great” because they have to or because they want to.
Tabitha the moa is not a taxi, you guys, come on.
Escobar the broad-faced potoroo loves pizza so much that sometimes, he re-writes the love poems of Rilke and replaces the objects of adoration with the word “pizza.”
Example:
Pizza Song
How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn’t touch pizza’s soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past pizza, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn’t resonate when pizza’s depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and pizza,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.
Oh pizza song.
Henry the thylacine can’t figure out what’s in the box because he never learned how to read.
oh my oh my.
both of the tron movies are actually trips that the dude is having in the big lebowski
head canon.
you are seriously messing with my zen thing, man!
{tron one feels like a revisionist prequel where flynn wins against dillinger instead of being pushed out of encom and left to become the dude. space paranoids was the last thing he ever aspired to achieve.}
lily cole by tim walker.
Does that prove that he’s some hard-core racist that doesn’t care about black people? No, but it does //suggest// he’s such a hard-core purist libertarian that he cares more about this abstract set of principles than he cares about any actual people. That he’s more committed to these rigid abstractions than he is to protecting the basic rights of human beings in the real world.
Atlas Ducked: Rand Paul & The Crouching Weasel Technique (by illdoc1)
jay smooth on why hardline libertarians creep me out.
that’s jack valenti, head of the mpaa until five years ago, speaking BEFORE CONGRESS in 1982 and likening the video cassette recorder to a murderer of women.
this is not about piracy, this is about monopoly politics. this is about terrible old men who are afraid of everything, and will fight any change for exactly as long as the public remains indifferent, then embrace it wholly because there’s money to be made.
these are the same rich dukes who have stood against every social movement in american history from women’s suffrage to civil rights, who supported slavery and the homestead act, who were against medicare and osha, who today protest gay marriage, abortion, islam, and mexicans.
old white conservatives are the worst people in the world. they have been on the wrong side of history for as long as we’ve been writing it down.
