Neon’s A Doll A Day… Again (2020)

[neon_jellyfish]

If it is a horror of a liquid? Wednesday would like to place an order.

Monty looks very interested in it.

And avainq, your art work is so cool.

Haha, I can see why Wednesday wants one. I think she (and a few other Room inhabitants) would enjoy visiting Oddwickshire, they could find other useful things there.
Monty is very interested in it, he likes everything dark and macabre
Thank you very much!

Love the shading and highlights on the bottle! And again, an authentic rendering of "old fashioned" style!

I very much like the atmospheric darkness of the fairground pic; the picture conveys  the mood I felt when reading Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Your lad's all-too-innocent exˆpression here suggests to me there's more than a little 'snake oil' about this elixir! 

Thank you! Old fashioned was exactly what I was going for!

I haven't read that one, only a few short stories, maybe I should put it on my list...

I think you're right! I wonder whose corpse what kind of problem is going to get dissolved...

Maybe it’s kind of a combination of both those theories… Seems like anything could be possible in Oddwickshire.  Nice shading on the bottle.
Holy cow, 45°?!?! I like the heat but that might be a little much. I think orchids got the reputation of being difficult in the days when ex-plorers went bushwhacking through jungles and brought specimens home; you had to have a hothouse and most people couldn’t grow them.  I agree phals are pretty easy...  Just like any plant,  you have to give them the right light, temperature, and water.

Thank you!
Yeah, the heat kills me every summer. I don't deal well with anything above 25°C to begin with, so not being able to hide in a cool place the whole summer is hard for me... Combine that with my vampire skin that gets burnt by the slightest ex°posure to the sun, and you can see why summers are always a survival horror for me.

I found out that Phalaenopsis aren't actually all that sensitive to temperature, they can thrive even when the temperature fluctuates. This flat gets hot in summer and cold in winter, and I don't have heating on all the time (it only has 'sauna' and 'off' modes, no comfortable room temperature), but they don't mind, as long as they have some basic amount of sunlight and water, they're fine. I also have an Acacallis x Zygopetalum hybrid, but she didn't blossom for two years in a row now, because of too high temperatures (and too little light in the only place I can keep her relatively cold).

Which one of your Oddwickshireites makes the acid? Floriane?

I don't think it's a named character. Florianne specialises in botany, so she could be involved if there are some ingredients extracted from plants, but I don't know Uni-Acid's composition.


Day 57

February 26th is the Tell A Fairy Tale Day. I'll put the TL;DR here, so you can fast-forward right to the photo, if you want. In short, I love fairytales. I also have some issues with them. Today's photo is about Sleeping Beauty. I love Sleeping Beauty. I also have some issues with it.

I love fairytales (I prefer it as one word). Both the old folk ones from various parts of the world and new the ones written by various authors. Most of all, I like the old versions of fairytales, with considerable amounts of horror and darkness and cool guys and gals. I could whine endlessly about how the new retellings of lots of fairytales got sanitized and characters flattened, but that's a rant for another day, today's rant will be specifically about Sleeping Beauty.

One of my favorite generally known fairytales is Sleeping Beauty. Some of my all-time favorites are either Czech/Slavic, and thus not very well known, or some of those horror-y ones that weren't possible to sanitize, so they got somewhat forgotten (Robber Bridegroom, anyone?).
When I was a kid, I liked Sleeping Beauty, because I always had insomnia issues, and taking a mighty beauty nap and waking into perfect life where everything has been solved for me had some serious appeal. Nowadays I like Sleeping Beauty because of nostalgia and aesthetic allowing for interesting visual interpretation. I just love the theme of roses and a slightly decrepit castle completely covered with thorny vines intermingled with skeletons of fallen princes.

Mind you, there are a few things I don't like about this fairy tale. Namely:

• Consent. When I only think about S.B. herself, it's not that bad, it's just one kiss, he's handsome (they always are), and hey, that pesky curse is finally broken. But when I think about the prince... You just waltz into a girl's bedroom and the first thing you do is kiss her? What's wrong with you, dude? Some versions solve this by having the kiss as the condition for breaking the curse from the start, and the prince meets some kind of ex²position-mission character, so he knows that's what he has to do, but a surprising amount of versions just doesn't bother with this. And don't get me started on Snow White.
  
• Age difference. Hundred years is just... too much. And yes, the time stopped (except for the roses, those kept growing), so she's still 17, but still. Language, culture, habits, social norms and other relevant things didn't change that fast in the past, so she would most likely be OK, but it still weirds me out.
  
• The new retellings make The Cursed Shrubbery more and more boring. It started off as an evil, semi-sentient entity that killed everyone who got near and the prince had to be brave and fight it in order to get into the castle (and it felt like he deserves that kiss). Then it still killed everyone, but it just got out of prince's way simply because the mandatory century passed, and the dude became The Prince Of Destiny just because he happened to be nearby at the right moment. Cheesy. And then it stopped killing altogether, and turned into a pile of decorative greenery with kitchen timer and Moses effect built in for the convenience of The Prince Of The Cheesy Destiny. Grrrrrh!!!
  

I actually started putting together my own versions that would get rid of these issues for me, but they're just a bunch of bullet points and they look nothing like a story, so I won't share them. I can't really write.

Howgh, I have jabbered, oof, oof! Now onto the photo. Finally. 'Tis about fricken time.

Here are my Sleeping Beauties!



Here are my Sleeping Beauties without the heavy filtering: