Man Older Generations Just Dont Get How Hard It Is To Get A Job These Days

reblog if you have skilled writer friends and you're damn proud of them

Update: I have been freed from bob-jail!

Today will be attempt 37 of trying to get something other than a bob.

You see, I have these duel curses and there are that 1. I'm apparently not enough of baddie to be given a not-bob and 2. that I belong in bob-jail for even asking.

Last time, I fought tooth and nail (asked very politely and over-explained myself and my choices) for an undercut that no one could even see under the bob I was given.

Wish me luck.

The horror of Eric Carle

Becoming a dad has really been a reminder of all the half-forgotten books that got me interested in horror: the ones that I will definitely share with my kid (The Minpins) and the ones that I probably won't (Not Now, Bernard)

And then there's Eric Carle, and now it's all coming flooding back - the very first time in my life that I experienced terror. Seriously, what the fuck is this?

Carle's most famous book, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, is in its own way uneasy and strange (the caterpillar's voracious and growing hunger is presented ambiguously both as an unavoidable and natural process of change and something greedy and grotesque; the caterpillar appears to devour its own place-of-birth and then feels good about it) but it flies under the radar by being very unCarle-like. The caterpillar is largely tiny and cute, we get plenty of colourful close-ups of tasty-looking food, and there are only two pages and a cover which feature Carle's favourite preoccupation: giant animals with irregular, scissor-cut eyes staring unhappily at the reader as they threaten to grow larger than the page itself.

I genuinely remember feeling deeply unnerved by Carle's first major piece of illustration work, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, written with Bill Martin Jr., but only now do I understand why. Holy shit, I have so many questions.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? I see a red bird looking at me.

Why is the rhyme-scheme so frantic and breathless, like it's being chanted out during an escalating ritual somewhere deep in the forests? Why are the animals - textured via collage as if half-carved from wood themselves - staring directly at us, the audience, before then revealing that they're actually looking behind us at something else which is staring back at them in turn? Why do so many of the animals look so fearful and haunted as they acknowledge the vast web of visibility which exists between them?

Why does the 'white dog' page - perhaps the only-genuinely-friendly-looking animal - briefly plunge us into night-time, creating the impression that these creatures are somehow watching each other across spans of time and space, when Carle is fully capable of just drawing an outline around the dog?

Why is the teacher's neck extending like a xenomorph's tongue as she glares with narrowed eyes down at the children (what horrible act have they caught her doing?) Why is the cover of follow-up Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear clearly depicting a Tuunbaq stalking the reader?

What seems remarkable and bizarre is that Carle, a talented artist, deliberately chooses to draw animals for infant readers which are neither cute nor charming but which consistently embody the internet joke about hares - feral wilderness prophets who've glimpsed the truth of the universe and gone mad - and has made a stunningly successful career out of doing so.

Carle's beasts know something terrible that they do not fully understand, and which they are incapable of sharing with us.

I'll avoid the crass temptation to draw serious biographical inferences here (Carle believed he had PTSD from an adolescence spent in Nazi Germany, and his works were inspired by his childhood walks with his father, who returned home psychologically shattered by his own experiences as a Soviet prisoner-of-war) and just say that there is something wonderful, awful and innocent in the fact that perhaps the most popular baby-book artist of all time, when asked to draw a goldfish, would respond with what is clearly a monstrous open-mouthed leviathan rising up from black depths to devour us all.

Look at this horrible fucking thing. It rocks.

Spin the wheel and whoever you get, you have to fight in one to one melee combat. You can't run away.

if you need a refresher on who you got, The Arthurian Name Dictionary by Christopher W. Bruce and The Arthurian Companion by Phyllis Ann Karr has you covered.

"Draw me like one of your anatomy illustrations."

part 2 of Utherus edits (part 1)

Now that I have small captive audience and 2024 is ending, please find hereunder my favourite new song from this year, Seven Years Below the Flowers by Luki. It's fun, it's wonky, it's high fantasy and it's so very worth a listen

Okay audience, you're free to go

Stollwerck’s Fairy Tales illustrated by Fritz Phil Schmidt (c.1898)

The Goose Girl, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Godfather Death

Finished this art for @liviapeleia as part of the @merlin-gotcha4gaza event!

I absolutely adore your story https://archiveofourown.org/works/57536806 and I hope you like the my little drawing inspired by Merlin answering the door and seeing Uther :)

bbc merlin is a fun silly show that begs the question what if you were given a destiny you didn’t understand and you betrayed yourself time and time again in what you think is a selfless act of love that will serve a greater purpose, only for that to be the exact reason you fail and the undoing of the person you love most. and then the random filler episodes are like this witch is doing terrorism in camelot by sneaking magic mushroom bombs into the soup and merlin has to gaslight arthur into thinking he doesn’t like mushrooms or something idk

More stunning art inspired by my microfic series this month 😍! Thank you again Sunfall!