brouillons @later-gators - Tumblr Blog

HOW TO USE BLENDING MODES

OKAY SO I KNOW A LOT OF PEOPLE ALREADY KNOW THIS BUT THIS IS FOR THOSE WHO DON’T

I know a lot of people who feel like they need to black or dark colors for shading and white/really light colors for highlights on their digital art, but this isn’t the case! There’s a feature on most painting programs (SAI, Photoshop, Manga Studio, and to some extent FireAlpaca) called blending modes that can help you if you want to try different colors for shading and highlights.

For this drawing, I’ve done the shading in a bright pink on a separate layer from the coloring.

There’s a menu above the layer list that says “Normal.” If you click on that, it expands to reveal several other things.

(this should look about the same for most programs)

In that list of options, there is one called Multiply. I like to use that for shading, so let’s click that one.

It made the pink blend with the layers below it differently, and it’s much darker and a lot more intense than simply using black would have been.

Mulitiply and Linear Burn are best for shading. Color Burn works, but it doesn’t show up on pure white. There are plenty of options, though, so don’t be afraid to try them!

You can also use blending modes for highlights. I like to use Soft Light, Add/Add (Glow), Hard Light, and Overlay for that. Screen and Lighten work pretty well, too.

Here i have the highlights in a light yellow (but not super light):

And here they are on Soft Light!:

There are lots of really wacky blending modes too, like Difference and Divide, that you can play around with too!

I hope this helped someone out there!

biggaybunny

I don't care about Dungeon Meshi otherwise but "Tallmen" is SUCH an elegant solution to placing humans in a fantasy setting that it's still blowing my mind. Just the term itself is enough to instantly recontextualize humans. They're no longer the default race. They're those big goobers with long legs, striding about all the time. I can so easily envision much more interesting relationships between humans and non-humans because of it. Like perhaps "tallmen" are stereotyped as shepherds by other races because they can watch over their flocks better, or as vagabonds because they are better suited to long travel on foot. And of course, they don't *literally* have to be taller than everybody else, they were just the tallest around whenever the label became the norm, or something like that. I just feel like it's so much better than what I've seen in settings like D&D that go "and humans are the... adaptable, generalist people :)!"

stormtide-leviathan

tags by @the-warlock-syndicate

mxrderscenes

writing is so funny because i could write nonstop for 9hrs and then hit a block where im like "how do i transition between this moment and the next?" and then i just dont touch it for 6 months

galadrieljones

Serious advice tho if this happens, it's likely because you already wrote past the end of the scene and wandered too far from the more logical transition point, and you should go back to the last time the writing felt "unforced" and cut everything after.

You can also just skip the transition. Really good writing can span years in a single sentence, like you can just authoritatively state fact and your reader will go with it.

xalphafox

This is GOLD! You just saved me like thousands of therapy costs lmao

headspace-hotel

When I was writing my fic last few months the strategy I used was "just skip all the scenes I don't want to write" and it worked great in my opinion

goldenonthemoon

A lil something something bc I had to decompress today :)

misti-step

project hail mary is a movie about circles.

watch on youtube

captain-price-returns

transmechanicus

Revealing the ignorance of my youth here, but who is this and what is she known for?

boybeetles

Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate

flurrin

Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.

crazy-pages

In all seriousness, if you live in the US and you aren't familiar with the misogynistic harassment these people in the game industry faced during Gamergate, you need to watch this series right now.

This was the beggining of the current form of the US fascist movement and it underpins the entire thing about it to this day. If you live in the US and Gamergate isn't familiar to you, you're missing critical history to understanding US fascism. I'm not joking even a little bit here, you will understand modern United States fascism so much better if you are familiar with Gamergate.

cumaeansibyl

Not an exaggeration. Gamergate led directly to the redpill/incel movement, which white supremacists exploited and colonized. Not to say that most of the white men in those movements weren't already racist to some extent, but that wasn't an active part of their politics until white supremacist recruiters came along and convinced them that the women ruining their videogames were part of the conspiracy to destroy the white race.

That's a very brief summary but you can go back step by step over the past decade and see how they did it.

linguisticparadox

Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?

Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"

Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.

ri-writing

Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/

Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.

It is free.

It is legal.

I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.

I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.

linguisticparadox

Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!

If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!

And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!

I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!

wanderingchaos

Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!

it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!

athenadark

Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain

lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons

because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death

Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune

and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it

the-haiku-bot

Also don’t think a

book is old because it’s in

the public domain

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

elfwreck

Want audiobooks instead?

LibriVox has free public domain audiobooks.

Public domain works in the US are:

Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and

Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and

Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.

(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)

There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)

There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.

Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."

noswordinourlake

Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.

stevespookington

browsing the top 100 books downloaded in the last 30 days can be really fun too, interesting to see how things change

https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30

rostekhorn

Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:

And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.

trambrosia

And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.

This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book

afaerytalelife

Embroidery Ribbon Art | Angela Yuklyanchuk Embroidery ribbon art is a very fascinating process… You never know what will happen in the end… Just take the cloth, brush, and paint — and under the gentle sounds of your favourite music, it begins to happen… And then you peer into the colour stains and compose their own flowers and herbs from silk ribbons and thread… Every time, there are new ideas and varying approaches, and they inspire, give development. My paintings are not simply embroidery, but mixed media, which I have gradually evolved through trial and error. — Angela Yuklyanchuk.

folkfaerie

I’m in disbelief, full of joy and fucking nackered.

The Amazing Devil were ✨incredible✨ last night. I still cant really fathom that I saw them live. Unreal. And we got a new song too, so the new album hype is real!

I got heatstroke and had a huge panic attack during the set and had to cling to my boyfriend for dear life with a fan blasting directly in my face but I managed to stay for the whole set and cried my eyes out for all my favourite songs!

And thank you to everyone in the queue who made incredible things and handed them out to everyone - I’ll treasure them forever.❤️

Love you all!

notthiscoolkid

So I finally cut an audio to songs from the amazing devil concert. Thanks to the best @youangelheart for sharing it!!!🫶🏻🫶🏻

The Amazing Devil- live 29.05.2026 - Google Drive

Tell me immediately if everything works cuz im terrible IT guy (im surprised thats i managed to cut it) All the files are mp3 so they're good for cd and etc. Enjoy guys💕

Here is setlist in order:

Drinking Song For the Socially Anxious

Horror And The Wild

Pruning Shears

Welly Boots

The Calling

Fair

Farewell Wanderlust

Gold (new)

Battle Cries

Inkpot Gods

could-be-wolves

Joey was, in fact, an EXCELLENT talker, but I'm going to have to chop up the video before tumblr will let me post it.

could-be-wolves

I'm guessing this will be in 3 parts.

For context, earlier Colin had introduced everyone, and explained that each person would give a 10-15 minute talk. Joey had said that he'd only found out about this 15 minutes before coming on stage, so hadn't prepared anything. In the previous talks, Peter had spoken about medieval attitudes to the 7 deadly sins, and Aleks had talked about silicon valley moguls who are seeking immortality (more about these later).

Disclaimer: I had originally only intended to film excerpts. The theme (as with the book) is filming. I kept filming, because what he was saying seemed really important, even if it was about not filming, so sorry for the hypocrisy inherent in these. But also, enjoy!

I'll do transcripts later.

could-be-wolves

I'm guessing this will be in 3 parts.

I'll do transcripts later.

could-be-wolves

Transcript:

Colin: So you'll talk a little bit, and then we can have a little interacting, perhaps.

Joey: Correct, yeah. You've got my notes on the laptop here. I want the clicker. Have you got the wee clicker?

Aleks: Did I put it in my pocket?

Joey: I just want to hold it.

Aleks: Ah, it was stolen by someone in the front row.

Joey:

Yes, thank you. And thanks everyone for coming out and hearing about... I feel like I'm following the intellectual equivalent of the Rolling Stones. So do bear with me.

I was told to say something today, and I thought a little bit about saying no. And just saying "no, I'll just have a nice little chat with you guys and see how it goes". But actually it kind of sprung on me something that I wanted to talk about, and that I talk about in It's Not A Cult, that's very, very linked to both of your fields. I'd like to talk a little bit today about moment, and memory.

The last time I was here in Hay, I wasn't at this Festival, I was at the other one. I was a wastrel. A snotty person who tried to, who thought he could do, everything. And ere festival invited my band, The Amazing Devil, to play. Now, we had our first album out, which was made in an old button factory for about £4000, and we were very excited. And we turned up and they said, "we know you're playing this evening, but would you like to play a couple of gigs?" And we thought "Oh my goodness, this is a moment. "

And we got out and played in front of 9 people. Which, and this is about 12 years ago now, I think something like that, and I'm so glad that I did. Because nobody filmed it. It was a beautiful failure. Our guitarist accidentally set for to his amp. There was a 5-year-old having the best time in the corner, twirling. No one could really try and capture that down a camera lens.

Even 10, 12 years ago now, social media was burgeoning. The people you've been talking about in your third point had claimed power, but didn't really know how to use it, or really how to monetise it. And we still had these cameras in our pockets, but they were new. You know, everyone, snip snap? What do you call that? Everyone was doing snip snap, but it was old and no one understood it. Tip top didn't exist yet. I don't personally use them, I don't know if you can tell.

But I found it a very joyous time because I didn't have anything to point at and say "that happened". I couldn't point at that gig and say "wow". All I have is the memory.

could-be-wolves

Beginning here:

💬 2 🔁 18 ❤️ 60 · Transcript: Colin: So you'll talk a little bit, and then we can have a little interacting, perhaps. Joey: Correct, yeah

Transcript:

10, 12 years later, Hay Festival invited me to come talk about this book. I've been writing books for about 18 years now, and this is the first one that's been published. And I knew that in the time when I started writing books at the age of 20 and now, the world had exponentially changed. And I had to talk about something .... that's my mic getting stuck to my beard....

I knew that I wanted to talk about something in this book that scared the crap out of me. And it was being filmed. There are one or two people filming me right now. And just before I came out here, they asked "by the way, we've got a camera, do you mind being filmed?". And I said "yeah, fine, yeah, absolutely. " It's ubiquitous. We are just so used to cameras invading every inch of our lives.

Children, before they even understand what it means to be remembered, are being remembered days later. I've seen 3-year-olds know that the 'x' on a phone means go away. They'll swipe if they want to see the next thing. I saw a child do that on the train here. Swiping the window.

In my book, in Its Not A Cult, which is gone now. Oh, it's back! That's why I need the clicker. I wanted to explore what it would be like if I had a character whose addiction to filming was all-encompassing. I've seen people in my life, in my lines of work, who are addicted to filming. I've seen...

... There you go, did you hear it? Did everyone just jolt to see if it was theirs? A phone just went off and we all just went "yeah, it's probably the babysitter". Your brain went somewhere else. To think about who might be texting you, who might be needing you.

And that's what this book is trying to explore. That memory of me 12 years ago exists up here. This memory exists elsewhere now. This memory that is happening right now, this moment, is happening down camera lenses. And I'm fine with people filming.

But to talk about your first point, and also what you spoke about, you described it as oil and wood. I started to wonder outside, do the people who exist in those wooden, in those paintings, and the people collecting data to be immortalised, did they ever think "Oh, I wonder if anyone is going to remember me. "

I wonder if that's important to me.

When I was 20 and I started writing books, that was the biggest driving force. It's... when I started theatre, as an actor, and then I started to get into television and film and I thought "great, well they can't delete that. " And good our bad, whatever it is, I existed and therefore I mattered.

With music, I can point at things that have been created and I can say that I created that. And yet, tomorrow night our band are playing, in a church, and we've not played in years because I'm so terrified of being filmed sometimes. I don't want to be captured.

And neither does the protagonist in this book. They want to capture everything, but never be captured.

amazingdevilfanpage

From The Amazing Devil’s instagram, May 31 ‘26

could-be-wolves

Part 1: https://www.tumblr.com/could-be-wolves/818057207735336960/transcript-colin-so-youll-talk-a-little-bit?source=share

Part 2: https://www.tumblr.com/could-be-wolves/818062113719320576/reblog-by-could-be-wolves-1-video?source=share

Transcript:

As I was listening to your amazing talks, I started to feel that familiar creeping up the spine of fear. The immortality that people are seeking is now so pervasive, I just wanted to ask, right at the end of your wonderful speech (speech?) you asked "fight it". And my first instinct was how the fuck do I do that. And the only way that I can do that is by not looking at my phone at the dinner table, right? I can write to my MP? And try to get some of these guard rails that everyone keeps talking about, around AI?

My jobs, I have a few of them,....

... is that the play off music? I feel like I'm at the Oscars, "that's my time, guys"....

... but all 3 of my jobs, and more jobs, are infinitely replaceable. You can now officially, I imagine this will be asked by the Hay Festival at some point on the website, you'll be about to take it, and you can do this now, and make me say anything. Absolutely anything. You've got my voice, my likeness. You've got a whole audio book of me talking this thing. And you can make me say anything.

Acting will be completely destroyed within the next few years, television and film in particular. It is my firm belief, streamers or what have you will have two sections of their website. One is real people, and, if you want AI, click that one. There'll be a little tag, and you'll be like, yeah, I fancy something AI tonight actually.

Same with music. You can plug in the music that I've created with my band or elsewhere and say: "make Joey sing this. Make the band... The band hasn't released an album in a while. Why don't I just make my own with their voices".

And then finally, books. I wrote for years, and this is the first book that's been published, and I feel like I've mistimed it. Because there's, we're trying, and a lot of the industry is fighting to ensure that writers, that AI can't draw on any writers. But it's only post-2016. So all that wealth of everything that's ever been written, and AI can come along and go "yeah, I'll write like that person". Yes, it's a bit shit at the moment, and we can see it, we can spot it, but that's only because we've only just noticed.

When was the first time you heard about AI? And I can promise you it was probably about a year and a half ago. When it really mattered. We talked about AI in sci fi. But really, the first time I started to go "oh god, it really is everywhere", was about 2 years ago.

So this book that I wrote is full of that fear. I first came to Bloomsbury with this book, and they said "well, what genre is it?". I said, "I don't know, what genre do you think it is?" And they said "...horror?". And I said "it's the closest thing". Because there's solkats and creatures in it. There's music and creativity in it. But the real fear, fear mongering of it, is in the filming of everything, and the being captured.

I said I wanted to talk about moment, and memory. I'm quite keen to hear, I'm going to ask you when I sit back down and say that I'm finished, how we're soon going to be able to preserve memories verbatim. But for now, and if we are going to attempt to fight this, and draw on the lessons of the past and these sins... I think yes, you're talking about 7 of them. But I think there's an 8th. And I think that's whatever is happening to us without knowing.

I think I'm done. Colin, what do you think?

could-be-wolves

At some point I might talk about the other talks, because they definitely gave me Thoughts, but maybe I'll wait until after I've read the books (I succumbed).

There wasn't time for a lot of questions afterwards. The first one wasn't addressed to Joey. The second one, which was a great question after we got past the very not-concise statement part of it, was something along the lines of "given the state of the world and all the things you've been talking about, what gives you faith?".

Joey's answer started with the caveat that he gave at a number of the booksigning talks that, although he himself is an empiricist, he has no problem with faith, the problem he has is with blind faith. The thing that gives him hope is community, and small in-person interactions.

I have a lot of thoughts in general about the topics in Joey's talk. When he talks about the levels of fear and anxiety he has, I do somewhat want to wrap him in blankets and bubblewrap and put him in a nice cupboard somewhere where none of these things can hurt him. But it's not as though I don't have a bunch of (somewhat different) anxieties and fears, and I try very hard not to let them hold me back, and I really hope he's doing the same. I certainly relate strongly to the idea young!Joey had of being remembered = mattering. But there are some things where it seems like as he seems to be trying to get away from that, and thinking about those differences he was talking about before between being known and being perceived, that he seems to have settled somewhere very far in the other direction, that doesn't sound like it's being all that healthy for him. I hope that performing despite that fear has helped.

With memory, and being recorded, I couldn't help but think of the absolutely incredible novelette by Ted Chiang, called "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling". I think the magazine it was originally published in is no longer available, but it's part of Chiang's short fiction collection, 'Exhalation'. I can't recommend highly enough. It rewired my brain on a scale that is rare, and I still think about it a lot. I won't say anything more here, because I wouldn't want to spoil it. But go read it and talk to me about it, please! I really wonder if Joey has read it, and if so, what he thought. If he hasn't, I really hope it gets sent his way! Maybe next time he does a signing tour I'll try to be coherent enough to ask, or write a letter or something.

could-be-wolves

Madeleine and Joey on what solkats they would be.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

brouillons