no one ever warns you about this about adulthood but no one tells you how important surfaces become to you. like it’s a perpetual struggle to get enough surfaces in your life and then in turn keeping those surfaces clean
Donāt know how many times Iāve showed a non-Tumblr person a Tumblr post and had the whole thing derail because the poor soul actually read someoneās user name.
āWhy does it sayāā *squints at the screen* āā¦.aziraphaleās flaming cock??ā
I can actually think of an alternative explanation: small print press. Heād put out orders for various rare books with the traveling merchants whoād come through town, and every so often theyād turn up with one and heād set about printing a hundred copies or so, then sell the fresh new copies to merchants heading towards various university towns like Avignon, Grenoble, Toulouse, etc. Heād likely keep a couple copies of each book for himself, generating a library, and might wind up with all sorts of books he couldnāt profitably make copies of to sell to the universities, like fairy tales.
If thatās his business model, then Belle might be the closest thing heād have to an apprentice, since we can see heās getting on in age and might have nobody else to even consider passing the business along to when he slips the mortal coil. As one final thought, her dad is an inventor, and might be the booksellerās only actualĀ local customer, which might also explain the relationship. Her dad would occasionally want certain types of books on natural philosophy, and the bookseller would be the one with contacts who could procure them. Just look how dangerous it was for him to go traveling all alone! Far better to leave that sort of business to professional traveling merchants.
If you combine these ideas, then you wind up with a bookseller who was training Belle as an apprentice for both small press publishing and money laundering, only to watch his very promising student be swept away by some rich guy the whole town was trying to kill twenty minutes ago. He admires her hustle, but it leaves a gaping hole in his succession plan.
Fortunately there are two newcomers in town, one with an eye for mechanics and meticulous attention to detail and one with a love of risks and charm to spare, and thatās how the neurotic clock and slutty candlestick take over the legitimate and criminal wings of his enterprise respectively.
I saw someone reblog this dismissing it as AI despite the fact theyāre 1 click away from a search engine.
āRosetta Nebulaā is all youād have to type.
Perhaps the biggest travesty with ai images is going to be robbing people of their wonder for whatās actually possible in the universe and continuing to shrink their bubble of understanding based on whether they believe it at a glance.
The image has been colorized differently above but the Rosetta Nebula is real and actually looks like that.
If it makes you feel any better (about turning 20)
Iām waaay hotter, more confident, physically stronger, and talented now at 33 than I was at 25 or 20 or 16.
Donāt let the Advertisers get in your head
We didnāt use to say people were āover the hillā until their 60s
Youāre NOT āpast your prime,ā youāre just getting STARTED
the reason all the Narratives are about 16-24 year olds is because thatās about as old as you can make an āEverymanā protagonist. People getā¦ specific as they age. You canāt tell a story that resonates with all 40-year-olds the way you can with 16-year-olds because the older you get the more āspecifically youā your lived experience gets
