New York City ballet production of Midsummer Nights Dream
The fact this isn’t a painting is a testament to one of the greatest feats of set design and production I’ve ever seen.
My god just look at this! The lighting, set design, photography… I’ve just never seen anything like it.
I think this is the first time I’ve ever been wowed by “this ISN’T a painting”!
Ok my jaw dropped to the floor and then i read some comments on this post. It’s a real set guys. People made this with their hands for hours on end to produce this absolutely stunning set, which got us this beautiful picture that got everybody bamboozled. I found these other pictures on a page someone linked in the comments. It is VERY MUCH real and not painted. Stop discrediting people’s work.
Not sure if I’ve told this story here before, but once upon a time, I didn’t really get the point of most protests happening my area because I viewed them as “preaching to your own echo chamber” in a lot of cases. Ex: I saw people do a climate march through a very liberal university campus within a very liberal city, and I was just like “Okay, everyone here agrees with you. This place has crazy aggressive sustainability goals. What is the point of this?”
Then when Roe fell, there were a lot of protests outside the courthouses in cities near me, and though those city courthouses do serve the surrounding rural areas as well, the cities themselves are all rather progressive and left-leaning, so once again I was like “Okay, what is the point of this?” but I went anyway just for the experience. We stood on a street corner with our signs. Most people driving by honked in agreement with us. A few people yelled “abortion is murder” at us out their car windows, and we yelled back “abortion is healthcare!” Cool, okay, still didn’t get the point because it’s not like we were changing any minds or there in large numbers (we were no threat to any power structures), and the city already largely agreed with us.
But then we got another SUV that pulled up and yelled “abortion is murder!” at us (both husband and wife this time). Looked in the back seat, and they were traveling with their daughter who was maybe 13ish. She locked eyes with me, gave me the most serious look I’ve ever received, and gave us a thumbs up just above the window ledge so that her family couldn’t see.
And that’s the day I learned that protests are not always about threatening entrenched power structures but letting people in isolated ideological bubbles know that there are other perspectives and that if they share them, they’re not alone.
Timely reminder that protests have many purposes, and one of them is to steel the nerves of the youth.
The Trump administration is preparing to fire hundreds of high-level Department of Homeland Security employees this week as part of a move to rid the country’s third-largest agency of people deemed to be misaligned with the administration’s goals, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
The sources said the Trump administration has a “centralized plan” and a list of people in high-level positions across every component of DHS who are to be targeted this week.
the world is running out of glassblowers and yet you want to become a fucking doctor
One of the most jarring moments of my university education was in a physics class when I was given a device that measures gravity and was told “this cost the university sixteen thousand dollars, but the only glass blower in the world who could make the glass springs inside it died so it’s literally irreplaceable. If you drop it those springs will shatter. Go fuck around with it for a day and take some measurements”
In the UK there’s a thing called the endangered crafts list which I highly recommend if you fancy discovering some crafts you never even knew existed. Scientific and optical instrument making is considered ‘critically endangered’ and glassworking (scientific glassware) is just considered endangered, which is for ‘crafts with a shrinking market share, an ageing demographic or crafts with a declining number of practitioners.’ There’s some other crafts in that category which are easier to teach yourself or go to classes on that list, like lithography, marbling or block printing on fabric, so it might be worth considering those if you’re looking for something to try.
Reblogging myself as I wasn’t expecting so many people to pay attention to my comment. Again this list is JUST FOR THE UK as I noticed someone commenting on that, please look into whether there are similar things in your own countries and share if you find anything as I’d love to see them.
There are some crafts considered ‘extinct’ because the whole process isn’t completed in the UK, like making cricket balls where most of the steps can be done here but not the stitching for some reason which is outsourced to India. There are lacrosse sticks produced in other countries where it’s more popular as a sport, otherwise the whole sport would have died out by now.
it does still make me insane specifically how many queer people lovingly embrace astrology. I went to a poetry workshop yesterday that was genuinely quite good but also included an option to disclose astrology designations during introductions and so many people broke out some variation of “I’m a [x] sum but I have a [y] placement and it SHOWS” girl no it doesn’t. that’s meaningless correlation you completely invented the causation
I’d say that rejecting biological determinism in favor of space gas determinism isn’t the slay the astrology queers think it is but if I’m being completely honest I fear that many members of our community haven’t even really rejected biological determinism so much as sprinkled a layer of glitter on it
amhrancas 