MNN @mernerner - Tumblr Blog

The first ones are (I think) unused Mandys from the Big Boogey cover. The second are from the Midway game. I used to try to draw the characters "fresh" each time without tracing them back, so there's always be a bit of variety.

maxwellatoms

I’m in my late 20’s and still feel like I haven’t found myself or a career to move toward. How old were you when you finally started to figure all that out? I always loved drawing but I recently became disinterested and I’ve had a hard time finding something to do with myself

I thought I had it all figured out by age 14. I wanted to become an animator! Nearly thirty five years later, I wonder more than ever what my future career will be. Maybe I'm being a Negative Nelly due to the state of the industry, but I do begin to wonder if it's wise to bank everything on Kids TV Animation.

If it makes you feel any better, I become disinterested in drawing too sometimes. I love to draw, but occasionally it's like pulling my own teeth to get myself to do it. And then I finally do it and suddenly I'm in love all over again.

I just booted up the ol' work computer for the first time this month, so we're gonna see how this goes. It sounds like the Millenium Falcon when it refuses to jump to Hyperspace. Fingers crossed!

chained-demon

sua-sponte-deactivated20200331

I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.

is-the-post-reliable

RATING: RELIABLE

you can listen to the clip of the 1954 interview here and find him on wikipedia here

friendshiptothemax

I was on a plane this weekend, and I was chatting with the woman sitting next to me about an upcoming writer’s strike. “Do you really think you’re mistreated?” she asked me.

That’s not the issue at stake here. Let me tell you a little something about “minirooms.”

Minirooms are a way of television writing that is becoming more common. Basically, the studio will hire a small group of writers, 3-6 or so, and employ them for just a few weeks. In those few weeks (six weeks seem to be common), they have to hurriedly figure out as much about the show as they can – characters, plots, outlines for episodes. Then at the end of the six weeks, all the writers are fired except for the showrunner, who has to write the entire series themselves based on the outlines.

This is not a widespread practice, but it has become more common over the past couple of years. Studios like it because instead of paying for a full room for the full length of the show, they just pay a handful of writers for a fraction of the show. It’s not a huge problem now, but the WGA only gets the chance to make rules every three years – if we let this go for another three years and it becomes the norm? That would be DEVASTATING for the tv writing profession.

Do I feel like I’m mistreated? No. I LOVE my job! But in a world of minirooms, there is no place for someone like me – a mid-level writer who makes a decent living working on someone else’s show (I’d like to be a showrunner someday, but for now I feel like I still have a lot to learn, and my husband and I are trying to start a family so I like not being support rather than the leader for now). In a miniroom, there are only two levels – the handful of glorified idea people who are already scrambling to find their next show because you can’t make a decent living off of one six-week job (and since there are fewer people per room, there are fewer jobs overall, even at the six-week amount), and the overworked, stressed as fuck showrunner who is going to have to write the entire thing themselves. Besides being bad for me making a living, I also just think it’s plain bad for television as an art form – what I like about TV is how adaptable it is, how a whole group of people come together to tell a story better than what any of them could do on their own. Plus the showrunner can’t do their best work under all of that pressure, episode after episode, back to back. Minirooms just…fucking suck.

The WGA is proposing two things to fix this – a rule that writers have to be employed for the entire show, and a rule tying the number of writers in the room to the number of episodes you have per season. I don’t think it’s unreasonable. It’s the way shows have run since the advent of television. It’s only in the last couple of years that this has become a new thing. It’s exploitative. It squeezes out everyone except showrunners and people who have the financial means to work only a few months a year. It makes television worse. And that is the issue in this strike that means everything to me, and that is why I voted yes on the strike authorization vote.

maxwellatoms

I am not in the WGA. Almost no one in the Kids’ TV Animation world is, unless they fell out of live action or got extremely lucky. For the most part, there are no Writer’s Rooms in Kid’s TV at all. I’ve been in a grande total of three writer’s rooms, the largest of which contained a staff of four people including myself.

On Billy & Mandy, I wrote a lot of outlines on my own but encouraged storyboard artists to write their own. For those outlines, they received a couple of hundred dollars and no residuals. These were usually one-to-three page outlines, and at the time it seemed like a nice little bonus for whoever wrote it. But the writer would receive no residuals for the writing, nor (until I put up a big fight in the last season) any screen credit for their writing. And then they’d go on to tackle the Herculean task of writing and drawing the actual storyboard, for which they would also receive no residuals. As bad as it might be for the WGA, it’s worse for TV Animation.

Twice in my career, the WGA has asked for my industry’s help picketing, with the promise they’d back us for WGA membership if they got what they wanted. Both times, they got what they wanted and we were the first to be cast aside. And (assuming the WGA is victorious) we will be again. I still support them, though. Not because they support me, but because it’s the right thing to do. If the studios win this one, the damage will absolutely trickle down to my industry in a way the money never has.

This writer is right. The studios are actively making entertainment worse and it needs to stop.

#i stand with the wga #wga

k-eke

Lil mom

ube-halaya-chan

phobia

[school project. artistic concern: perception. depicting objects that make people cringe]

greenyvertekins

I’m friends with Yuji Naka on Facebook and as of about 3 minutes ago, he’s aware of Sonic’s revealed movie design.

Don’t know about you but his perceptibly curt comment may indicate that he’s not a fan of what Hollywood did to his, Oshima’s and Yasuhara’s creation.

sallysfunnykiss

Imagine creating a beloved, iconic character thirty years ago and waking up one morning to see this.

dizzydennis

A couple more comments from Yuji Naka.

The top one reads: Did a marketing company just revealed the shocking appearance of the live action Sonic?

The bottom one reads: When I saw the full visual of Sonic’s body, I felt that it’s important to keep the roundness of Sonic and his head. It seems like they couldn’t achieve that balance.

Yuji Naka has been outspoken before and he definitely isn’t happy now…

beevean

I can’t even make fun of this design because Yuji Naka’s comments are just so sad :(

k-eke

The first adventure.

cannabiscomrade

There are a lot of posts going around about hypothermia and let me just say that anyone who tells you to take clothes off to prevent hypothermia (unless you’re soaking wet) is trying to fucking kill you

Check your sources. If OP has no stated/proven medical training then you shouldn’t trust their medical advice. Sweating will not kill you- but dress to your comfort. Listen to your body. Learn about wind chill and frostbite. Your sweat WILL NOT FREEZE if it’s hot enough under your layers to generate sweat omfg

Edit: obviously if you can, change your clothes if they’re wet, but like it’s not necessary and if you’re poor and you don’t have options keep your clothes on

And lastly never fucking sleep naked if you have no power and are trying to not freeze. Your house will never get warm enough in an arctic blast to make you sweat.