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pixel skylines
Xuebing Du
Not today Justin
i don't do bad sauce passes
hello vonnie
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will byers stan first human second
$LAYYYTER
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Cosimo Galluzzi
noise dept.
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Misplaced Lens Cap
DEAR READER
ellievsbear
Love Begins
Cosmic Funnies
Three Goblin Art
Discoholic 🪩
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@poskii
Elizabeth Kirkman Fitzhugh, Militant Mary
November 13, 1914
I had never heard of this character before, but it really was published over a hundred years ago. Here’s a comics blog talking about her, and a couple more gems:
It's hard to believe that this blog has been running over a dozen years now, and I am just now getting around to mak
It's a lot healthier to go for a daily walk than to sign up for a gym membership you won't be using because you hate that kind of exercise. It's a lot healthier to eat a frozen meal than to skip a meal because you were too tired to cook something healthy. It's a lot healthier to take a quick shower than to procrastinate an elaborate routine for days. Don't aim so high that you won't be hitting anything!
this is actually really helpful and affirming thanks
you're cute and it's tuesday
I'm cute and it's tuesday
saw someone trying to roast this guy on reddit but all the comments were just like "fuck off, that's based"
nature is healing
FUCK YEAH.
hi uh would you please Say More about majoring in television writing (and maybe about then(?) becoming a lawyer)
oh yeah sure. I went to a very fancy undergrad (U.S. News & World Report puts it in the top ten, I think? though it was not in the top ten when I went there; not an Ivy League, yuck). I was entering from a high school film and tv-ish magnet, and I made it into their film major program as a freshman. They had very robust film production, analysis, and screenwriting courses on offer all the time. But there was one special program that started partway into your college career and required even more applications, only took a handful of people out of the whole school, very prestigious, etc.
I was actually genuinely surprised when I made it in, but also really satisfied. It was one of the first times I can think of that I got real external recognition of something I'd worked hard to get good at? By that point I'd practiced writing over and over and over, and I'd written a lot of, like, bad, bad things.
I remember constantly buying notebooks and writing a few pages of feverish imaginative weirdness in them before abandoning them for most of my childhood. Scriptwriting happened later on, when I was in middle school-ish, when I discovered that people always tended to compliment the dialogue I wrote, which I thought at that time meant I was naturally good at it and I should do nothing but that. (I swear to god, it took me SO LONG to realize that practicing the thing you're bad at makes you better at it, and life isn't just a stream of inborn talents that either exist or don't.)
I started by adapting a novel to a screenplay, which was a work of complete top to bottom love on a novel that didn't deserve it even slightly. Shitty old 80s military scifi novel I can almost guarantee you've never heard of, not an award-winner, this one. I streamlined the overcomplex plot and diversified the characters, for a bonus. (I added women. GASP.)
After that, I wrote my own Star Trek show. It was like Firefly set in the Star Trek universe, and it was not particularly original. I wrote about 10-12 episodes, and used to invite my friends over for parties where I would feed them pizza then make them read the scripts out loud. They each had regular roles on the show. Then a spinoff of that, about one of the characters of the first who was a Section 31 agent. Then a Stargate spinoff. Then some original work, and the short film that got me into the program at my university.
I read tons of books on screenwriting. (Only one is worthwhile: Story by Robert McKee.) I practiced all the time, and I practiced by doing. I had no idea what kind of craft I was building. Even the fanfic I wrote was honing craft.
Here's what I learned in school.
Scripts are made to be filmed. Scripts must accomplish a goal, and they must do so in rigid, set ways, but beyond that, they can be anything you want to tell. Structure and story are synonymous in a way that they often are not in other media. If you fail at any given scene, you failed twenty pages ago. You failed at your outline. You didn't have a structure that would support what you wanted to build.
People reading scripts are ruthless. They're looking for a reason to throw it away. (Not always, okay, but still.) If you fail, even if you have something beautiful, you will not get hired.
So screenwriting like that makes a writer who's an engineer and a problem-solver, as well as a creative. You have to be creative, because without a steady stream of ideas, you can't trim them into the right shapes.
Then I learned legal writing, which... is incredibly strict on structure and form, down to the paragraph level, with certain vocabulary, sentences, and signals that tell the reader what to think and how to think it. It can be unimaginably stupid and unimaginably complex. Screenwriting skills are suited to it wonderfully. That kind of structural analysis and understanding makes an incisive legal writer; that kind of ruthlessly culled, hyper-efficient and still poetic prose makes for a readable one.
I don't know why I like both of these things. I can tell stories about why I moved from one path to another (I hated living in LA [true], I needed to be Doing Something [also true], both of these jobs feel like holding secrets [true], both of these jobs are telling stories [true], law school paid me more to go to it than anyone paid me to do actual jobs in los angeles [truuuuuue]) but the fact is I can't articulate the feeling that being a lawyer and being a writer both give me. Maybe I like speaking with many voices.
I'm gonna add that so many art skills help make you a great lawyer.
As a singer and musician and former theater kid, some obvious skills I learned on stage that help me in the legal field: how to speak to an audience. Like, I'm not a litigator, I'm basically a compliance dude sitting quietly in my office. But when I need to give a presentation or a briefing, particularly if I'm speaking to a crowd, I always get compliments on my confidence and speaking skills. It's 100% just recycled theater kid. Diction, diaphragmatic speaking, pacing, eye contact, improvisation, more.
I've also done a fair bit of creative writing, although less than OP and more casually. Playwriting being one of them.
Where I start to lose people but the hill I will absolutely die on is that my legal writing has to sing.
A lengthy memo has to cohere like a piece of music. What is your main point? That is your melody. The evidence and support and arguments are like the chords and orchestra, they have to support your melody. A great turn of phrase that you repeat at key moments in your writing to drive the point home is like a leitmotif that sticks in the ear. Good writing can rise and fall like the swelling of an orchestra with phrases short and long and rests between. Counterarguments have to be handled like you're resolving a dissonant chord. Your conclusion is like the final, powerful major chord, trumpets blaring, reinforcing your conclusion.
And most importantly, the whole thing has to be in the same voice. It can't sound like two people or a group of people all writing different paragraphs that you jammed together, even if that's how it was written, piece by piece. Just like a song shouldn't sound like two or more pieces of music cobbled together. Your writing speaks week one voice. It has to be in the same key, have the same melody. It has to flow.
Legal writing has to sing!
Artists make damn good lawyers.
Pallas's Cat aka Manul (Otocolobus manul), mother and kittens, family Felidae, Tibet
photograph by Shanyuan Li
Finding out that Frances Dana Barker Gage, a white woman, rewrote Sojourner Truth’s famous speech to be more stereotypically “Southern slave” (complete with slurs and misspellings like dat, dere, dey) when Sojourner Truth was actually from New York and spoke only Dutch until she was almost ten and wouldn’t have actually sounded that way linguistically and decidedly did not use the phrase “Ain’t I A Woman?” at all is…whew. And on top of everything, she embellished details about Sojourner Truth’s life (like the number of children she had/how many of them were sold into slavery), wrote that ST said that she could take beatings like a man, and the reception of the speech in the room (she claims ST was called a n*gg*r, earlier accounts say the room was welcoming).
Lmaooo peak white feminist antics.
You can read the most accurate transcript here, alongside the racist edited one.
I was already disgusted just reading about this but looking at the side-by-side comparison of the real speech and the rewrite really brought it home.
See the two versions of her first line below:
Yeah I remember a few years ago when I found this out through Feminista Jones and was mad but not that surprised because white woman so….
This sent me down a bit of a research rabbit hole and I found a cool thing where afro Dutch women read Sojourner’s speech aloud in their contemporary Dutch dialects in hope of offering a more truthful rendition of her authentic Dutch voice.
had to watch a sea urchin fertilization lab for school and the way they dispose of the fertilized urchins is putting them in a tub labeled “used” lmao
cruelty
slutty urchins banished to the whore chamber
Just found a $50 bill in the street let’s hear it for girls posting their Ws online
Oh my fucking god I am going to kill myself
50 foreskin dollars
Puts the product on tumblr for all to share it
My what a guy, that Gaston.
Bugs Bunny could singlehandedly defeat Thanos by dressing up as a TSA agent and setting up a metal detector in the middle of the battlefield saying that all metal objects must be removed if you want to pass on through now stick around for my 2,000 word essay on just how effectively he would convince The Mad Titan to comply
“For shame, doc! Dontcha know we got other folks waiting?”
(Thanos looks behind him and sees dozens of Bugs Bunnies dressed as angry yelling travelers with huge bags of luggage. Thanos rubs his neck guiltily and begins sliding off the gauntlet)
I felt compelled
Nobody expected you to draw T. Hanos himself in the Looney Tunes artstyle but you absolutely fucking delivered
I love rocks that look extremely like someone just tested the demon blade on them
Good god that guy and bird must be strong
NEW FISH JUST DROPPED
I KNOW that playing God is morally wrong, but holy HELL, it looks fun.
Why is it playing God? We aren’t violating any natural laws. God set the parameters of the universe to allow these things. There’s nothing wrong with it, there’s no hubris in learning more about how to manipulate the universe around us.
We made a whole-ass fish.
The reason this was accidental BTW is because they used paddlefish eggs as a negative control group for a breeding experiment on sturgeons because the scientists, quite naturally, assumed that they were SO unrelated it would be genetically impossible for them to mate. Like. I cannot stress enough to you how these creatures last related ancestors were
140 MILLION YEARS BACK.
If you don't know how far that is, that's basically the start of the cretaceous. Let me simplify that for you even further. Chimpanzees and humans seperated, what, 5 or 6 million years ago?
This is basically like if humans could hybridise with THESE THINGS.
This is the sort of thing that should be impossible. They used those eggs to be ABSOLUTELY 100% SURE NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN.
And then THEY GOT FISH OUT OF IT.
Like. You can quite clearly understand why they didn't think anything would happen. WE ARE MORE RELATED TO BLUE WHALES THAN THESE THINGS.
THE AMERICAN PADDLEFISH AND THE STURGEON ARE SO COMPLETELY UNRELATED THAT THIS IS NOT PLAYING GOD. IF ANYTHING THIS IS AN ACT OF GOD.
THE SCIENTISTS HAD NO BLAME IN THIS BECAUSE NOTHING LIKE THIS HAD EVER HAPPENED BEFORE
It sort of goes against the rules of genetics a bit.
Oh i forgot to add
THESE THINGS, FOR HYBRIDS, HAD A REALLY HIGH SURVIVAL RATING. LIKE 70% OF THEM SURVIVED.
To put that into perspective, getting a blue whale and a squirrel and trying to hybridise them is more sensible, and that wouldn't produce anything but getting you banned from science. Most animals that aren't plants can barely hybridise two degrees away from each other.
BUT THESE TWO ENTIRELY UNRELATED FISH create PERFECTLY HEALTHY HYBRIDS.
the scientists literally had to do the tests AGAIN just to be like "okay this is real right. This is actually like, not a fluke, this works right" and it worked again. They just Can!
So for those who don't know what the original fishes look like, this is an American Paddlefish:
And this is a Russian Sturgeon:
So honestly, saying the hybrid is "weird looking" is a bit fort de café when you see its parents. I think the sturddlefish looks cute.
"these creatures last related ancestors were 140 million years back"
(glances at fish)
Yeah that's exactly what I thought you'd look like, you Mesozoic fuck
#Holding a red squirrel in my left hand and a blue whale in my right desperately hoping to make a purple squale (via @dykepuffs)
placental mammals (eutheria) diverged from marsupials around 100 million years ago. whales and squirrels (rodents at least), being both placental animals, would have diverged at or after that time, meaning sturgeon and paddlefish still have 40 million years more separation.
before the sturddlefish, a purple squale would have seemed more likely- and since that's ridiculous and obviously no one would think that's possible except as a joke, that should speak to HOW impossible this situation seemed, and why they thought obviously this will be perfectly fine. If you took squirrel eggs (the gamete) and tried to use whale sperm to fertilize them, you could reasonably expect that to not work. That should be a good control. The eggs would definitely not actually be fertilized, and even if sperm somehow made it into the egg and some kind of development started, you would expect them to not make it to term and definitely not make a whole ass new animal that's perfectly fine actually.
And yet there is a purple squale in your fish tank, in fact there's like 100 of them and everyone is saying you played god but this was not what should have gone down, this was never the plan. This isn't you playing god, you think, this is god having a laugh at your expense.
