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will byers stan first human second
hello vonnie

Andulka
noise dept.
Today's Document
todays bird

Discoholic šŖ©
Show & Tell

if i look back, i am lost
Claire Keane

JVL

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trying on a metaphor
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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Monterey Bay Aquarium
AnasAbdin

JBB: An Artblog!

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@bridgetsnapdragon
babygirl i'm obsessed with things that you've never even heard of. and i will tell you about them. in excruciating detail.
Hi Mr Gaiman,
You might not remember this, but you spoke at UC Santa Barbara back in 2010 as part of their Arts & Lectures series. Before your lecture, you first had dinner with some donors, their son, and their son's new girlfriend. That girlfriend was me. In our nervousness, bf and I only brought my set of books for you to sign, so you signed them to both of us. We joked that now we had to stay together forever, for the books.
Well, our daughter turns six next week and we're about to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. Thank you for your books, one of the first things we ever bonded over.
That put a big smile on my face. I'm glad.
quick question, w hat are you rodents doing to my cat?Ā
Here, I fixed her. I donāt know why you think weād believe that such a creature could exist without middle legs.
quick question, w hat are you rodents doing to my cat
Okay, this is silly. Sheās only supposed to have four legs.
QUICK QUESTION,,
sheās gone.
honestly at this point, thank fucking god
Day 14: Flag
Guys, I canāt seem to draw a straight line today to save my life, but hereās an OFMD/Super Mario mashup.
Taika Waititi for The New York Times
While the series told the comic tale of Stede Bonnet (Darby), a befuddled but well-meaning aristocrat trying to make it as a pirate, it did not simply dangle Blackbeard as an unlikely mentor to Bonnet and a source of will-they-or-wonāt-they, bro-ho-ho innuendo.Ā
In the first seasonās penultimate episode, Bonnet and Blackbeard realized they loved each other and shared a tender kiss. Their romance has become integral to the series going forward, and the inspiration for countless works of fan art that Waititi keeps saved on his phone.
As much as he understands the cultural fascination with Stede and Blackbeardās kiss, Waititi said he wished it wasnāt remarkable for its rarity: āIt needs to be normalized.ā
āNo one talks about Tom Cruise hooking up with Jennifer Connelly in āTop Gun,āā he said. But in āOur Flag Means Death, āitās a massive talking point that two dudes kiss on the beach. Iām cool with talking about it because Iām really proud of the moment. But my dream is to be like the world of the pirates, where no one bats an eye.ā
the love story being so central to our flag means death really is mindblowing. i havenāt stopped thinking about it for months. it is, to its core, a romance. that was the point. the queer romance wasnāt written in in the second or third season because the fandom picked up on the homoeroticism and made a ship popular. it wasnāt added in because the fans demanded it or because the actors pushed for it later on it wasnāt forced into slowburn by a network it was there the whole time.
when stede showed ed his secret closet that was on purpose an allegory, when they shared the marmalade bread that was romantic intentionally, when they rowed away from the burning party boat and ed was looking at stede that was him FALLING IN LOVE . thatās how it was WRITTEN. ed really actually leaned in and almost kissed stede in the moonlight scene. and then. they actually kissed! like i know this is months old news now but i canāt get over how fucking different this feels to other queer romances iāve seen. it is the core and central plot of the show and itās beautiful. itās funny itās cute itās heartwarming itās GOOD. they did it.
hey folks, Iām gonna introduce you to two very important fandom terms and they are watsonianĀ and doylistĀ
they come (obviously) from the sherlock holmes fandom, and they are two different ways of explaining something in a story. say Iām a fan and I notice that, in the original books, watsonās war wound is sometimes in his leg and sometimes in his shoulder. the watsonian explanation is how watson (that is, a person within the story) might explain it; the doylist explanation is how sir arthur conan doyle (a person in real life) would have explained it.Ā
sherlockĀ explains the migrating war wound by making the shoulder wound real and the limp psychosomatic. the guy ritchie films explain it by having the leg wound sustained in battle before the events of the film and the shoulder wound happen onscreen. the doylist explanation, of course, is that acd forgot where the wound was.
this is very important when weāre discussing stuff like headcanons and word-of-god. I see this when people offer watsonian explanations for something, and then a doylist will say something likeĀ āitās just because the author wrote it that way,ā and I see it when a person is criticizing bad writing/storytelling (for example, the fact that quiet in metal gear solid v is running around the whole game in a bikini and ripped tights) and someone comes back withĀ ābut thereās an in-story reason why that happens!ā (that reason being she breathes through her skin).
thereās nothing wrong with either explanation, and really I think you need both to understand and analyze a text. a person coming up with a watsonian explanation has likely not forgotten that the author had real-life reasons for writing something that way, and a person with a doylist interpretation is likely not ignoring the in-universe justification for that thing.Ā
but itās very difficult (and imo often useless, though there are exceptions) to try to argue one kind of explanation with the other kind. wetblanketing someoneās headcanon withĀ āor it could just be bad writingā is obnoxious; dismissing someoneās criticism withĀ ābut have you considered this in-universe explanationā is ignoring the point of the criticism. understanding where someone is coming from is important when making an argument; acting like your argument is better because youāre being doylist when theyāre being watsonian or vice versa is not.
itās been 5 million years but this thing still gets notes with likeĀ ācan someone explain this to me in a shorter, easier wayā so here it is:
watsonian:Ā the enchantress cursed the eleven-year-old prince from beauty and the beast and all of his servants because fairies donāt understand why humans would think thatās insane and unfair.Ā I am using in-universe evidence to explain why the character might think or act a certain way, as if belle and the prince and the enchantress are real people.
doylist:Ā the writers didnāt realize that the prince would have been eleven when he was cursed until it was too late to change it, and the servants are also cursed because talking furniture is funny and allows for unique character design. I am explaining this plot point based on an outside knowledge of how writing works and how writers think.
ancient humans were also just some guy, if you got a baby from 60,000 BC and raised him in the 21st century heād just be another teen boy named logan who tech decks off your arm
this boy from tom bjƶrklundās art WOULD own a minecraft creeper plushy
YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ok ok ok Iām so sorry but I HAVE to talk about this
thereās something so loving about what tom bjƶrklund does and just- fuck Iām foaming at the mouth here
facial reconstruction isnāt a new concept (see the Kennewick Man/Patrick Stewart incident) but itās difficult to find people that are truly good at it! genuinely there is a big gap in this field because there just arenāt a lot of people who do it professionally!
facial reconstruction, especially from bone or bone fragments, is such a fascinating intersection of art and science, and a tremendous amount of care is put into determining what these people might have looked like.
with that said, itās VERY easy to screw it up
configuring muscle attachments and fat distribution is genuinely *very* difficult to do, and when you do it badly, you get this (pictured above). by adding too much muscle, they gave this 600 year old man a VERY interesting jawline (notice that the bottom of the chin doesnāt match up with the bone at all!) and they *really* made him look older than he was. would you believe me if I said that he was estimated to only be 46 years old?
basically Iām just REALLY excited about Tom Bjƶrklundās art because itās amazing work, just from an anthropology perspective
just look at this!!!
facial reconstructions arenāt just an artsy thing that you can just say āoh, thatās cool!ā to
by giving these people faces, even if they arenāt always accurate, we open the doors for the average person to connect with the past at a very human level. sure, looking at bones is cool, but looking at art of someone that lived millions of years ago is *incredible*
looking at a picture of a boy that lived millions of years ago and thinking āyeah, he wouldāve loved Minecraftā is EXACTLY the reaction that these pieces are meant to elicit
āI went to school for game design! I am highly qualified to talk about any game out there!ā
I bet you donāt even know how big an 8 year oldās hands are.
You cannot meaningfully understand a great deal of Nintendoās game development decisions without understanding how a child holds and uses a modern game controller. People love to critique game companies like Nintendo, especially core gamers and educated developers, as if they are some authority on game design but in twenty years I have never seen this type of individual talk about how Nintendoās game design is constrained by the size of a childās hands.
Soā¦how big are they?
Big enough to use a dpad on the playstation controller but not large enough to use the analog stick comfortably. The opposite is true on the xbox controller. The shape of the joycon is designed for easy access for small hands for both.
Still, the kidās thumb will have difficulty reaching both so rapid switches are not possible. On the left hand of the switch the stick is above and the dpad below, and the opposite is true on the right. This is a direct consequence of how a kid might use the controller. In most games the left hand controls movement - meaning an analog stick - and the right hand controls discreet inputs - meaning the dpad/button diamond.
Childrenās also struggle to reach shoulder buttons and have lower grip width, so the natural gamer grip in which two fingers are resting on the shoulder buttons does not work at all for children. They usually have to use all four fingers to hold up a heavy device. The shoulder buttons go from being the most easily accessed buttons on the controller to the most difficult.
A childās grip strength is lower, and thus so is their ability to hold a heavy controller comfortably, especially one not designed for their hand size. A single joycon in sideways mode, often used in childās party games on the switch, is a far better controller size for a child while it is uncomfortably cramped for an adult.
It is not a coincidence that the Switch, which is marketed as a family console, comes prepacked with the controllers that are kid friendly and adult friendly controllers are a secondary purchase.
There are more things you can point out, but in a practical sense you can see these design principles applied by comparing something like Kirby vs Metroid Dread.
Kirby is almost entirely controlled through the face buttons, with only the rarely used defense button mapped to the shoulder buttons, and you can really get by with never using it. The triggers are not used at all. You rarely have to combination press anything. If my memory is correct, the shoulder buttons are never used for any temporary transformation abilities. The difficulty of using new abilities should not be compounded by hard to reach buttons.
Dread on the other hand uses combination presses a lot and ties three critical abilities (free aim, missile use, and sliding) to the shoulder buttons. The omega cannon, a rarely used but critical and time sensitive ability, is tied to the shoulder buttons for the easiest and most intuitive possible use. The stress of defeating an emmi should not be compounded by fumbling with controls.
Smash Bros in particular is pretty cool in how its control scheme is set up. The most basic functions that a child might use are very simply mapped to the single stick and face buttons. As you learn to play better and try more advanced techniques (like an adult might) like timed grabs, dodging, and shield use you move away from the face buttons, incorporating more and more use of the shoulder buttons. It splits the difference for the best of both worlds. You can trace the principles of this design all the way back to the N64 and I would not be surprised to learn that the in game mechanics were built specifically to compliment this novice to expert transitional design, which is what makes smash bros so friendly to novice and expert gamers alike.
#i have smallish hands for an adult#and arthritis#so this is relevant to me too#something to consider
This is an excellent point as well, something I wasnāt going to get into but so much of game design just ignores accessibility issues like this all together. So many of the basic assumptions of game design from input device to button mapping to in game accessibility features are built around the assumption of fully abled adult between late teenager and middle age.
You are small potatoes to me. And brother Iām about to start mashing
Interesting to me that lmao is thriving but rofl is critically endangered, perhaps even extinct in the wild
me irl
It's Wee John Wednesday, my dudes.