Swim Swim

[polarity-disturbed]

Could you imagine making your own movie, making like 20 million dollars, and then going “awesome, now to install a DVD duplicating machine in my house and personally burn copies by hand like a medieval monk preserving sacred texts”

Like I need people to understand the mental image here of a multimillionaire internet creator personally overseeing DVD production in his own house like he’s running an underground bootleg operation out of a basement in 2007.

It’s weirdly charming because there’s something very “old internet” about it, this energy of “I made a thing, and now I will physically hand it to people myself like an artisan at a craft fair.”

The man really said: “The future of cinema is me standing next to a humming disc burner at 2am”

And like... I can't help but believe he's onto something

[witch-hattery]

I think the reason this feels so radical is because we're so used to everything coming from huge corporations that any smaller operations are sorted into novelties.

We don't really see "garage companies" grow into something bigger on the regular. I'm pretty sure most of the ones in living memory were people seizing the online shopping space when the internet first hit the mainstream, and a lot of those had big investment capital as well.

So seeing someone climb from bottom up ends up feeling "weird" or even "wrong" to us, because we're so used to untouchable corporate monoliths dominating industries uncontested.

It's a hopeful sign that free markets aren't completely dead, but this is only happening because entertainment media isn't (yet) so tightly regulated that newcomers are shut out completely.

BTW, in the 80's, professional software was being sold on the same kind of floppy disks people bought blank. I don't see any reason the same can't be done with SD cards today. (I get that USB is more versatile, but SD cards are so much more compact and portable.)

[do-not-u-dare]

”Explain yourself” followed by “stop making excuses” has always baffled me because the fuck you think explaining myself is????

[queer-folk-abroad]

It doesn’t mean ‘explain why you were right’ it means ‘explain how you got it wrong and how you’ll fix it/ avoid getting it wrong in the future.’

[themarshmallowreturns]

don't fucking defend this bullshit. we all know what it means. it means "speak, so i can accuse you of lying or making excuses or breaking something".

[foxofthelake]

Ah, so an axe to grind; in my defenition an excuse is a curse no matter what the answer is you are always wrong, and only an act of the Gods can save you.

[do-not-u-dare]

”Explain yourself” followed by “stop making excuses” has always baffled me because the fuck you think explaining myself is????

[queer-folk-abroad]

It doesn’t mean ‘explain why you were right’ it means ‘explain how you got it wrong and how you’ll fix it/ avoid getting it wrong in the future.’

[themarshmallowreturns]

don't fucking defend this bullshit. we all know what it means. it means "speak, so i can accuse you of lying or making excuses or breaking something".

[anim-ttrpgs]

Reblog to Save a Life

I have talked about it before, but independant artists, and by extension independant TTRPG designers like myself and my team, live and die by their social media presence. We can't afford a lot of advertising, if any, and so we rely not only on word-of-mouth advertisement, but also just the good will of our audience. Like another designer @cavegirlpoems put it, we're basically busking, putting our art out for everyone and hoping for voluntary donations, donations which I writing this am reliant on as a disabled designer who can't work a normal job.

If you can't pay, you can still have it for free, and something that can be just as helpful is reblogging the posts of artists like myself. I'll demonstrate with a screenshot from our itch.io page for the open beta for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

(and on these days, it was only about 6 or 7 people who did the reblogging.)

As you can see, reblogs mean more people see our game, which means more downloads (and sometimes even payments), downloads mean more people play our game and more people see our game in the itch.io algorithm, which means more views, which means more downloads, which means more and so on and so on. But, it all starts with you reblogging our posts, and without that, we're stagnate. It doesn't matter if you have 1,000 followers or 10, your reblog means that our posts reach corners of tumblr that wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

Myself and others are reliant on a 2-second reblog to be able to support ourselves as artists, you and your 10 followers are where it starts.

[orteil42]

utterly delightful family of words and things

[melgillman]

Here’s HSTHETE, the 24 hour comic I drew this year!  Thanks to everybody who followed along on twitter this weekend as I posted these pages <3

PS: if you liked this, there’s a whole book of these comics available now!

[melgillman]

I’m reblogging this 7-year-old comic of mine because, not only is it somehow still circulating, it just passed 400,000 notes??? Thank you, several hundred thousand internet strangers, for keepin’ this ol’ goat girl goin’ so long

(Also hi, I’m still making fairy-tale-flavored lesbian romance comics and have a new one coming out very soon…)

[forgamers]

(unmute)

[complete-trash-and-despair]

Fun fact: the owner of this red birb (Gumi) is Hideaki Utsumi, who worked as a sound designer for Capcom in many of their games. His wife composed for plenty of Capcom games too. He has a YouTube channel where he just posts videos of his birds being cute. Check it out.

[mrsurlaw]

Gumi is a bastard

[superbeans89]

Reblog Dinosaur Cloud for good luck

[beardedmrbean]

@mrcloudyfun

[chocolatesquared]

Visit Original Link

[mendelpalace]

So guess what? The composer of this legendary JRPG-esque song for The Weather Channel actually came forward recently, having learned about the song’s quasi-meme status. His name is Chris Kennedy.

[tamlin12]

Secret Kobold Smithing Technique!

for @runicknight

[velvetvexations]

Weird Fantasy (1950) #18 written by Al Feldstein and drawn by Joe Orlando, with editor Bill Gaines

[velvetvexations]

So he said it can't be a Black. So I said, "For God's sakes, Judge Murphy, that's the whole point of the Goddamn story!" So he said, "No, it can't be a Black". Bill just called him up and raised the roof, and finally they said, "Well, you gotta take the perspiration off". I had the stars glistening in the perspiration on his Black skin. Bill said, "Fuck you", and he hung up.

Al Feldstein, Tales of Terror: The EC Companion

[iconuk01]

Just to add context for those not aware of the impact of this story.

The reason it was so important for narrative purposes, was that the plot concerns the visit of the Astronaut, in his completely opaque spacesuit, to a planet populated entirely by self-aware robots (originally from Earth) who have built their own society and are petitioning to be allowed to interact with Earth again as equals.

They have a democratic government and free choice of careers etc. as the orange robot serving as guide tells the Astronaut.

The Astronaut notices that there are two different types of robot on this world; the orange ones, who are in charge, gifted access to all information and facilities. and the blue robots, who are seen as more limited in function, have less access to information and resources, and are not allowed positions of power or as wide a choice of employment opportunities. Even transportation is segregated.

The Astronaut investigates further and discovers that the blue and orange robots are actually structurally identical, there is absolutely no difference between their potential or capabilities, and it is only because the orange robots are instructed by their Educator system to consider themselves superior, that the difference exists.

The Astronaut tells the robots they are not ready for re-alignment with Earth, until they come to terms with their own unfairness, and how Earth had had to deal with this issue themselves. When that time comes, the robots will be able to ally with Earth.

Then he leaves in his spaceship, and it's only in that one final panel that we see the Astronaut is black.

Not subtle, nor should it be, but for 1950 this was a breathtakingly powerful statement, perhaps the first of it's kind in the genre.

The black character was not a caricature, or comedy relief, he was a main character in his own right, a human who "simply" was black.

[assortedinsanities]

Ok, but this story is sadly revolutionary even now. That is not just a human who happens to be black, as far as every other character in this story is concerned this is the most important, maybe even the only human they ever see, who happens to be black.

As depressing as that is, but a black person just casually representing the entirety of humanity is a breathtakingly powerfull statement even today, a quarter of a century later.

[about-faces]

[alex51324]

reblogging for Black History Month!

[pankendev]

isafish

[pankendev]

[pankendev]

fishabelle gets flakes

[kawareo]

Tumblr is like our elderly dog and when she makes an especially scary cough we apparently think "oh god it's the big one"

[kawareo]

Grief is a spectrum as you can see

[kawareo]

Our shit dog is alive and we love her

[imaginary-cats]

"Don't say your character growled, he isn't an animal!" okay but have you considered that i am intentionally drawing that parallel for a reason. he is dangerous, he is feral, he is ready to attack like a dog or a jungle beast. words have these things called connotations that allow them to carry layers and layers of meaning that would otherwise take sentences to convey--sentences that wouldn't do it as well as "he growled." i say this as an english major and as someone who has been writing for over ten years: "growled" is a valid word choice when you want your readers to know that your character fucking growled.

[fimbulvetr-now]

Holy shit has the vapid online writing advice really metastasized into never using poetic or metaphorical language?

Yeah please don't let someone's lack of imagination or misinterpretations of Vulcans as aspirational strip you of your literary devices.

Also maybe don't take writing advice that's framed as an absolute at face value

[pifflish]

Every time I see an author promoting their debut Greek mythology retelling on twitter I mourn the loss of like. To put in ineloquently. Just using these stories as inspiration for your own. Your story does not need to force itself to fit the shape of Orpheus and Eurydice it’s fine you can just allude to their story!! You can use their themes!! Nobody is going to arrest you for being allegorical instead of literal!! I might eat them alive at this point. It’s the only way.

[writercultureis]

writer culture is knowing you're going to look back on your work and cringe but also knowing you won't improve if you don't write right now so you churn out some bullshit anyways

[capsyst]

I love animation history and one of the things that always baffled me was how did animators draw the cars in 101 Dalmatians before the advent of computer graphics?

Any rigid solid object is extremely challenging for 2D artists to animate because if one stray line isn’t kept perfectly in check, the object will seem to wobble and shift unnaturally.

Even as early as the mid 80’s Disney was using a technique where they would animate a 3D object and then apply a 2D filter to it. This practice could be applied to any solid object a character interacts with: from lanterns a character is holding, to a book (like in Atlantis), or in the most extreme cases Cybernetic parts (like in Treasure Planet).

But 101 Dalmatians was made WAY before the advent of this technology. So how did they do the Cruella car chase sequence at the end of the film?

The answer is so simple I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner:

They just BUILT the models and painted them white with black outlines 🤣

That was the trick. They’re not actually 2D animated, they’re stop motion. They were physical models painted white and filmed on a white background. The black outlines become the lineart lines and they just xeroxed the frame onto an animation cel and painted it like any other 2D animated frame.

That’s how they did it! Isn’t that amazing? It’s such a simple low tech solution but it looks so cool in the final product.