Theresstillsomethingimustdo - Rb!

What do you do when you almost die in space? Leonov drew the orbital sunrise.

Alexei Leonov was the first person to walk in space. When he couldn’t sleep after pressurisation in his suit meant he almost couldn’t get back into the capsule, Leonov picked up his sketchpad and pencils to create the first art in space.

Green (2021):

‘A curved band mixing black and blue represents the portion of Earth visible due to the rising sun. Above the planet, a narrow curvature of red, then yellow, and then the black of space. And in the center of the drawing, we see the red sphere of the sun, almost risen behind the curvature of the Earth. It says something to me that the first art made by humans from outside of Earth's atmosphere depicts Earth's atmosphere.

Leonov was astonished by the brightness of the stars from space, but he did not draw that, nor did he draw himself floating, looking up at the spaceship. He drew home. He drew what Mary Oliver memorably called "this, the one world we all belong to."’

Though we see the orbital sunrise in a more photorealistic way now (NASA, 2021), Leonov’s shows what it might feel like. The awe to see all of humanity’s history in one place, all humans who had ever existed except himself and his team.

‘I like to look at Leonov's drawing when I am exhausted by despair and drudgery, or when I feel the weight of longing and fear pressing in on my chest. I look at the picture and think of all that had to happen for the drawing to exist, for Leonov to exist, for anything to exist. I look at the drawing and take a long, slow breath, and think of how my lungs were made for this air.’

Quotations from John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed (2021), images from Brown (2015) and NASA (2022)

seeing straight men be disgusted by booktok smut recommenders has actually radicalized me to the side of booktok smut recommenders. girls your taste may be atrocious but i will never disparage you for exposing mainstream discourse to the concept of soaking through your underwear. spent my whole life listening to men talk about penises it’s about time they get jumpscared by women talking about pussy in crude detail on social media. go forth and goon my warriors

I made this a couple of months ago but. hack your 3ds. do it right now.

In the Air by Artem Chebokha

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

Happiness on the same earth

penelope didn't have to turn the tree bed into a riddle. she could have asked odysseus to prove his identity, to tell her something only he would know — which she actually did a few books earlier, when she asked the beggar to describe odysseus, and odysseus told her about a purple cloak with a particular golden brooch that she fastened herself twenty years ago. when penelope tells telemachus they have signs by which they'll know each other, you sort of expect more of the same. and instead, she decides to trap him. like a bug in a cup.

and it's delightful to me, idk, how odysseus has been trapped and cornered in various way throughout the odyssey, but arguably never so that he has to tell the truth to get out. (with the phaeacians, maybe? the omniscient narrator corroborates some of what he tells them, but do we really know everything?) and in fact he is not trying to get free of penelope. he wants something from her, wants to convince her, wants to be welcomed home, but until this point he's lied to her, revealed himself to other people before her, and been distant with her (though also patient! he doesn't try to strongarm or rush her into accepting him; it's his idea to sleep elsewhere).

except penelope isn't looking for him to be distant and patient. penelope lies in a way that requires odysseus to stop playing along — not only to prove that he knows what odysseus knows, but that he's willing to tell the truth about himself.

Zaun's royalty

Yellow Dragonfly Ripple - Nicholas Harding , 2021.

British , b. 1956 -

Oil on linen , 51 x 61 cm.