Whelp.

Animation coming to you from the middle of fucking nowhere! 40s, Trans-man, Stuck in East Texas

[felixtheanimator]

[demilypyro]

This tweet had me absolutely flabbergasted twice because I read this and I was like "Dame Aylin? The tall, blonde, supermodel demigoddess? How is she at all outside of the beauty standard? This is stupid" and then I scrolled down and there were a hundred replies by straight dudes who were calling her ugly and talking about anime women they prefer

[ohnoitstbskyen]

Two and a half years ago now, I made a 60 second video briefly discussing the lack of variety of body-types in female characters, and I made what I thought was a very gentle and restrained argument. I showed some pictures of Olympic-level female athletes and said "hey, if you're designing physically powerful characters, maybe this is a better reference point to start from than supermodels."

It went... unpleasantly viral, and still to this day it gets a dozen to a hundred comments per day, depending on how much the algorithm is pushing it. And they go basically like this:

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments like this, completely non-stop. I've removed the most heinous bigotry from the screenshots here (transphobia, racism, violent misogyny, etc), but they are all the same two or three arguments, the same thought-terminating clichés, regurgitated on auto-pilot, forever.

I think it's easy to underestimate just how deeply brain-poisoned culture is by the beauty standards that are pushed on us. There is this reflexive and instant disgust response in so many people at the mere suggestion that anything other than the beauty ideal could possibly be desirable. And it is disgust, because nothing else can produce such amounts of venom and moral judgment so fast.

The women that these people are all so offended by look like this, by the way:

From the photo collection Athlete by Howard Schatz, 2002

I thought was making a mild, inoffensive, milquetoast suggestion in my video. I wrote it thinking "okay, what's the broadest, most mainstream acceptable, gentlest, most non-controversial version of this argument I can make?"

But it turns out there is no gentle version of that argument you can make. The suggestion that women in particular could or should be anything other than idealized objects of beauty is a form of totalizing violence, an obscenity, to the sensibilities of a distressing number of people.

[bookishdiplodocus]

Reblog the writers’ fortune cookie for luck!

[redeadepression]

Guys I reblogged this and then wrote an 8000 word story I didn’t even have a solid plan for. Reblog this shit.

[felixtheanimator]

3in. Molly The Molotov Sticker

One 3-inch, vinyl Molly the Molotov sticker.  All proceeds go to getting this trans-artist their top surgery!

[aurumacadicus]

The kids on TikTok think that just because he was a classic country singer, Johnny Cash was conservative??? My babies he covered a Nine Inch Nails song in his seventies.

Classic country singers (the majority of which came from poor roots) were always talking about how much The Man sucked because they were taking money from poor rural folk. You’re gonna tell me that’s conservative?? Get outta here.

[aurumacadicus]

And somehow on the opposite side of the scale with the same exact opinion the conservative kids say “I like the old country music, because there’s no politics to it” Woodie Guthrie’s got a “this machine kills fascists” sticker on his guitar? You think there’s no politics in 9 to 5 or Folsom Prison Blues?!

[hermit-skrab]

For anyone confused there was a sudden and dramatic shift in the country music genre. It used to be a genre fixated on the experiences of people. Lived or common experiences that resonated with the common people. It was music that you listened to and it thrummed in tune to your soul because you had lived it yourself. And a lot of that was about ordinary people getting ground up in the gears of society.

The hyper patriotism, beer, and trucks chimera we have now didn't show up until after 9/11 and the world is lesser for it

[rubenesque-as-fuck]

[onbearfeet]

Allow me to post the entire lyrics to the Johnny Cash song "Man in Black", released in nineteen goddamn seventy-one and written about why he always wore black onstage:

Well, you wonder why I always dress in black

Why you never see bright colors on my back

And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone

Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down

Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town

I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime

But is there because he's a victim of the times

I wear the black for those who've never read

Or listened to the words that Jesus said

About the road to happiness through love and charity

Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me

Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose

In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes

But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back

Up front there ought to be a man in black

I wear it for the sick and lonely old

For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold

I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been

Each week we lose a hundred fine young men

And I wear it for the thousands who have died

Believin' that the Lord was on their side

I wear it for another hundred-thousand who have died

Believin' that we all were on their side

Well, there's things that never will be right, I know

And things need changin' everywhere you go

But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things right

You'll never see me wear a suit of white

Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day

And tell the world that everything's okay

But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back

'Til things are brighter, I'm the man in black

That right there is an anti-war, anti-bigot, anti-mass-incarceration, anti-war-on-drugs (Cash was an addict in various stages of recovery who was pissed as hell about how this country treats people with substance issues), eat-the-rich protest song. And it was arguably his signature song, his personal manifesto. Notice that even the Jesus reference, which today would be a signal that the song is about to drop some racist dogwhistles, segues immediately into a line about "the road to happiness through love and charity". As in "Motherfucker, our shared god said love thy neighbor and care for the poor and the outsider, and we both know he didn't fucking stutter." He's throwing shade at self-described Christians who use his religion as a cudgel to beat people with.

Johnny Cash wasn't a conservative. I'm pretty sure if he were alive and in reasonably good health today, he'd knock Jason Aldean's teeth out (or, failing that, write a song so devastatingly memetic about how much Aldean sucks that Aldean would never work in music again).

Johnny Cash was punk rock. He just happened to be punk rock in the body of a country singer.

[felixtheanimator]

Felix [Animator] (@[email protected])

123 Posts, 80 Following, 25 Followers · #USA #Texas (and rather be elsewhere) #Autistic, #adhd, #trans, #dad, #animator, #Anticapitalist, #a

I honestly love the mastodon platform, but there's not enough art content on it imho. Any 2D animation folks wanna set up over there? I'll follow you.

[actuallynickels]

What has been your favorite part of Lackadaisy? (I must say I ADORE the animation with the visible sketch lines. It gives such a welcoming homemade feel to the show!)

I think my favorite part was getting that dang pencil to finally look right. Idk if most people here know this, but I built from scratch the brush used to line the characters as well as the early pipeline for how the look of the characters would be handled in cleanup.

My goal was to create a line texture for Toon Boom that looked like the Xerox Era of Disney animation. This was where the animators would take their rough pencil drawings and use basically an old school printer to copy and darken those lines so they looked like finalized cleaned lineart. This was done to cut costs so they wouldn't have to draw AND line every single frame because Disney wasn't doing so well financially back then (crazy to imagine now I know), but the end result was a really unique aesthetic!

Obviously we went a touch more clean than these. I just wanted to show some really nice and crunchy examples. Even so, funnily some people thought that was a mistake instead of a throwback to a long gone era of animation haha I don't blame them tho. People are much too used to hyper clean/crisp lines and we wanted to bring that dirt, grime, and TEXTURE back in for a nostalgic vibe. I'm still proud of how these early tests came out and the further refining the rest of the team did to get that final look is incredible.

[felixtheanimator]

I need to make/find that brush aesthetic for OpenToonz.

[s0ckh3adstudios]

WE'RE GETTING THAT SEASON BABYYYY

[theautumnaldemon]

*LOUD JOYOUS SCREECHING*

[sundove88]

EEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

[felixtheanimator]

@thunder-jolt Thought this might interest you.

[solarpunkbusiness]

7 Principles that guide Cooperative Business Models

Cooperatives are based on the idea that those who use an enterprise — the members — should also own and govern it. Cooperative members decide to produce, how to do it, and what to do with the profits. The goal is to make businesses truly accountable to those they claim to serve.

Cooperatives have advantages over investor-owned or purely for-profit companies. For example:

Cooperatives are innovative, often identifying a missing market. They’re a ground-up approach; traditionally, they have evolved when people have to figure out how to do what no one will do for them.

Cooperatives can have lower costs. Volunteerism and sweat equity reduce start-up costs, and co-ownership can mean lower transaction and contracting costs. When people trust each other as co-owners, they can cut fair deals more easily.

Cooperatives have greater trust and loyalty from customers. Customers see cooperatives as providing higher quality products and more worker and community benefits.

Cooperatives are more resilient. They have a lower chance of failure, especially after the startup phase, and greater resilience in downturns (likely due to shared sacrifice and greater risk aversion). 

Today, as digital firms dominate the economy, the democracy of cooperatives has even more appeal. It can provide safeguards around data privacy and labour conditions, both under threat.

Source and more information

How to Adopt a Cooperative Business Model - Network for Business Sustainability (NBS)

Cooperative businesses can contribute to a more just, resilient economy. Here’s how companies are adopting cooperative business models.

[thunder-jolt]

Which of these Digimon designs I made are more nightmare fuel?

FalseHydramon (A lady with four pairs of arms, one having heads for hands)

Tatarigamon (The Demon Boar Gods from Princess Mononoke but it ain't a boar-)

GOD! KILL THEM WITH FIRE! (both/see results)

Voting ended onNov 22, 2023

To clarify the reason why I made these designs: They're both designs made for when Alyssa "Goggles" Haine further ascends into becoming a Digimon god she becomes something terrifying and fucked-up-to-look-at.

But for now, I'm only doing this poll to see which is more likely to give someone nightmares.

[felixtheanimator]

😱😱😱😱

[what-even-is-thiss]

You know the Grimm version of Snow White makes more sense than most versions if only because in that version Snow White was like 7 years old.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Like imagine you find a 7 year old in the woods and she’s like my mom is gonna kill me because I’m prettier than her and she’s not kidding. You know this queen is that sort of person. So you and your roommates adopt the kid and tell her don’t talk to strangers. And she keeps talking to strangers and getting poison combs stuck in her hair and whatnot.

Like yeah that’s kinda stupid but also she’s seven. She likes apples.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Also imagine it from the hunter’s perspective. The queen tells you this bitch is prettier than me I need you to take her out in the woods and kill her. And then you see who you’re supposed to kill and it’s a 2nd grader. Like how are you supposed to react to that sort of situation? Kill a human child? No. Because you’re not a brainless evil minion you’re just some guy dealing with a cartoonishly evil monarch. Of course you let her go.

[what-even-is-thiss]

Bad look for the Prince of course. Even if she did age while she was in that glass case. He saw a dead woman and just decided to keep her. And once she stopped being dead he was like we’re married now

He did cause the evil queen to dance to death in red hot shoes though. That was kinda cool.

[thedupshadove]

With the acknowledgement that I'm grasping at straws, is it ever directly confirmed that the Prince wasn't also 7?

[thedupshadove]

See, I think that still works.

You are the guardsman assigned to protect the eight-year-old Prince. You are currently in the middle of the forest because he absolutely had his heart set on "going hunting", and the royal second-grader should definitely not be traipsing around the woods on his own. You let him go a little on ahead and he comes running back talking about how there's a dead girl in the clearing and there's no-one else around and he wants to take her home because she's really pretty, Hans, and she's all alone!

You let him drag you to said clearing and okay, that is one angelic-looking dead child alright, and on the one hand the quality of her clothes and the craftsmanship on the coffin (who builds a see-through coffin?) speak to potential Consequences if you simply carry her off, but also for the amount of vines that have grown on the coffin she looks extraordinarily un-decayed, so you should probably get the court alchemist's opinion on that, and there's no way he's going to come all the way out here in his embroidered velvet curly-shoes. And also this kid is technically assigned by God as your natural superior, or something.

So fine. You hoist the coffin onto your shoulder (it's not like the Prince can do it. He's eight.) and head back toward the castle, Prince chattering blithely all the way. And then you turn your ankle on a rock and suddenly there's a thump and a cough and a lot of shouting from inside the coffin and you have now become a key player in a tense political incident with the next kingdom over.

You should probably ask for a raise.

[phantomrose96]

You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?

[pendragyn]

it's probably from assholes making asks a minefield of trolling/harassment for years with no real blocking ability, which turned people off from allowing asks on their blogs so as a whole the site moved away from it

but now that we do have better blocking, we should try to revive it.

[triflesandparsnips]

Reblog if your ask box is open.

[skiplo-wave]

Like to charge reblog to cast

Count your fucking days Devil

[felixtheanimator]

The ability to 'scrap' a project to get money from the gov't... Incredibly unfair. If I could do that I wouldn't have to worry about money!

[odonata523]

Male Scifi and Fantasy writers: Look at this !Strong! female character! She can fight and solve puzzles, and ends up with the sidekick not the hero! Isn’t she a great character?

Everyone: No, she’s one-dimensional and still only exists to please the hero’s ego

Male scifi and fantasy writers: You’re never happy! This is how characters are written! Besides, it’s much harder for us to write women because we are men!

Terry Pratchett: *creates a female character who is literally the embodyment of a dog, sets her up to be the love interest of Protagonist Hero Man.* *writes her as clever, emotionally tortured, lonely and powerful* *uses her to explore difficulties of bisexuality and masculine dominated workforces*

Terry Pratchett: *Creates a pair of old witches, one of whom is a virgin and the other who has slept with lots of men.* *makes them best friends, never dismisses one lifestyle of the other, explains lifestyle choices based on characters history and personality, uses this to develop each character as the books progress*

Terry Pratchett: *Writes Sybil Rankin* *makes the powerful rich lady heavy set but beautiful, never plays her by her looks, develops her as she ages, acknowledges the way society views such people and then spits on their attitudes* *does it again with Agnes*

Terry Pratchett: *Writes a book about an entire army secretly being women, creates complex female relationships, introduces same sex relationships completely naturally*

Terry Pratchett: *takes old joke about female dwarves and uses it to explore gender identity without making it seem forced or unnatural, carefully discusses some of the issues and complextities whilst still making funny and witty observasions and maintaining genuine fantasy tropes*

Terry Pratchett: *DOES THIS ALL OVER AND OVER AGAIN, DEVELOPING CHARACTERS AS HIS VEIW OF THE WORLD DEVELOPS AND CAREFULLY APOLOGIZES FOR EARLY MISTAKES*

[odonata523]

Excellent note by @spiderleggedhorse

[dduane]

Terry’s writer superpower was always Thinking Things Through. All the way through.

[felixtheanimator]

Felix [Animator] (@[email protected])

120 Posts, 80 Following, 24 Followers · #USA #Texas (and rather be elsewhere) #Autistic, #adhd, #trans, #dad, #animator, #Anticapitalist, #a

[felixtheanimator]

Trying to Bloom | Instagram | Linktree

Artist.

[felixtheanimator]

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