treading water

oozey mess
Today's Document
DEAR READER
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No title available
occasionally subtle
Jules of Nature

shark vs the universe
i don't do bad sauce passes
wallacepolsom
almost home
YOU ARE THE REASON
todays bird

pixel skylines
Monterey Bay Aquarium
noise dept.

if i look back, i am lost

@theartofmadeline
Sweet Seals For You, Always
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

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@jacoblefton
treading water
Certainly not a criticism of your fine work running this blog or of your mission for greater exposure to historical works depicting POCs; but how do you feel about the diminutive European gaze and fetishistic exoticization and/or eroticization that accompanies many of these pieces? Should these works be celebrated? Criticized? Both? Not an art or history major, just an interested party, so these are not meant to be leading questions in any way. Genuinely seeking to learn!
Almost every post I have that would fall under the category of Orientalism is accompanied by a link to an article like this, or this. Keep in mind that this particular genre came considerably later than the Middle Ages, but I cover those centuries too since no one else was doing so. Sometimes I add a few words of my own to a work that seems especially Out There:
A reminder that many of these paintings fall under the umbrella of Orientalism: most of these scenes never existed, and while live models were used, those models were almost always European and the scenes are a figment of Western fantasies. They in no way accurately depict these people or cultures. For more, read Chapter 1 (Misunderstandings) of The Middle East: A Cultural Psychology for more on how these misconceptions became a kind of Western canon.
Gaining an understanding of the ways in which these works both created and reinforced harmful stereotypes about people and cultures is definitely a prerequisite to appreciating them for what they do have to offer.
The way I think these works can be appreciated is as a connection or a precedent towards people of color in Fantasy art as a genre, and as a source of beauty rather than being seen as “ethnographic” or in any way representative of any actual peoples or cultures. They can also be appreciated as a celebration of individuals and modeling, and a celebration of personal beauty. Take for example Ludwig Deutsch’s The Palace Guard:
A work like this is mainly a work of fantasy, although the individual in the painting was certainly a model employed by the artist.
One thing that has made a few people cranky about what I post sometimes is my appreciation for fantasy illustration, including illustrated books, graphic novels, and a massive employer of fantasy illustrators, Wizards of the Coast (Dungeons and Dragons; Magic: The Gathering):
The point I’m trying to make here is a visual one, to show a sort of continuity that can be seen as both positive and negative, but overall is worthy of study, curation, analysis, and thoughtful contemplation.
Why is it that the older works are used to pigeonhole and stereotype people of color in academia, but fantasy illustrations are seen as a form of fantastical empowerment that people of color should be barred from participating in because it’s not “historically accurate”? We should work to untangle this double standard, and try to understand how racism (and many other forms of institutionalized bigotry) can perform a kind hypocrisy that ends up in the exclusion or erasure of people of color from art, as long as the goal is the upholding of whiteness. How can we counter that narrative? Does celebrating these works help or harm?
Freeee!
Animation diary #7
the ICE train between the Netherlands and Germany travels at 200km/h, which is quite fast. luckily, the scenery is all the same, so you have time to take in the details
Animation diary #6
There’s an old wooden covered bridge near where I live in Germany, and this is kind of like the water wheel on the mustard mill right next to it. Sorry for the skipping -- the program Animation Desk is not really for this kind of work, but it’s on my ipad, so it’s portable and comfortable to use...
... have you ever...
animation diary #5
Animation Diary #3. I’m using Kdan’s Animation Desk for the iPad Pro. It’s buggy as you can see here. This one should have all the layers hidden, but the skeleton layer pops up in one frame on the gif export, which is really sloppy.
Simple review: Animation Desk is one of the best ipad animation tools out there right now, which is pretty sad. It is not a robust program, and it’s buggy. You only have two layers, which makes producing anything of note very difficult, and the tools could use some tuning - it’s hard to get a nice smooth line. The workflow tools need some tweaking. But, I’ve been getting decent results from it, I like the portability of having it on the iPad, and I hope that Kdan can turn this program into a more robust platform.
Also, the program transposes and deletes frames at random each time you open it -- they released a patch recently claiming to have fixed this phenomenon. You can see the hammer wobbling around in the middle of the gif. The program deleted one or two frames and copied another, and I didn’t care to fix it because I need to start a new project.
Unstill life. yum.
hello darkness my old friend
can't get rid of it
It's following me!
Okay Google, you have taken it too far. (You Can Play Pac-Man On Google Maps Right Now)
Been playing with sumi ink lately. Here are some experiments and in progress work.
I participated in the Global Game Jam at Hampshire College this weekend (it was only 24hrs, not the whole 48). I joined a team working on a game that ended up being called FISHIS -- a multiplayer simulation of a school of fish dodging sharks. The important mechanic is that no one player has all the tools necessary to properly avoid the sharks, so they must communicate with each other. I worked on the art side. Hexels 1.3 was the program of choice, and everything was tweaked in photoshop. It was lot of fun, and I would definitely do it again!
A mannequin at a shop in Berlin -- I tried some watercolor. The pages are just too thin...
Kickstarting a port of Glorantha to the D20 system
Rob writes, One reason that Glorantha, a legendary RPG world that has influenced designers like Sandy Petersen and White Wolf founder Mark Rein-Hagen, has been out of the mainstream is that its gaming systems (RuneQuest and HeroQuest) are not as familiar as D&D’s D20-based system.”
Read the rest….
Glorantha is a pretty amazing world, but one of the reasons it's nice is that where it started was a really vibrant system. Porting it to D20 is like putting it in a wax museum. It's never going to get past the uncanny valley between a shitty system and one that has some life.
How about we do some work to get the word out about good systems, and to design better ones, rather than continuing to wreck everything by remaking it in D20?