Ian Stone, Doubting Thomas, oil on linen, 12x16 in, 2023
“If you know the painting by Caravaggio, Doubting Thomas, it was my direct inspiration for this piece.
A doubting Thomas is a skeptic who refuses to believe without direct personal experience. 50-60 years ago, it was not uncommon for people to think or believe that being gay was a phase or a mental illness or deviance in some shape or form. It’s embarrassing that the same things are being said about trans people today.”
STOP SCROLLING!!! THIS IS NOT A PHOTO IT’S OIL ON LINEN!!!!!!!!!
I’m trying not to reblog posts on this blog but I feel that this is important to post here.
on a related note:
And for the people asking “Well if you don’t support it irl then why would you like it in fiction?!” Because when it’s happening irl real people are suffering and dying and that’s horrible and I’d never want that. But when it’s fiction, when no real people are being hurt or killed, it’s interesting to explore the experience, the effects it may have, and to an extent experience the emotions involved without actually having to experience the horrible thing. You explore scary, dangerous things from a safe distance.
It’s the same reason I love disaster movies and don’t love actual disasters. I mean, if someone can’t intuit the difference between watching a movie like 2012 and yelling “cool!” when LA slides into the ocean and being horrified at the real life effects of global warming and the idea of millions of people dying as a result, then *I* am not the one with the problem.
[First image: A heavily-overlapping venn diagram labelled “things I like in works of fiction” and “things I would never approve of in real life”
Second image: A venn diagram labelled “things I like in fanfiction” and “things I actually want to see happen in canon”. The circles overlap, but barely.]
somehow knowing that tumblr is being kept around mostly as a testing ground for advertisers and corporations doesn’t even make me feel that exploited, because every social media site is exploitive. but being basically lab rats to test shit on before it’s refined for use in polite society is by far the funniest possible way to be exploited.
#yeah maybe i’m a marketing lab rat but at least my dash is in fucking chronological order
this ad appeared right after i read this post.
so yeah, they’re testing something, but in true lab rat fashion we have no fucking clue what