Land of the Lake

Hey. I'm Jack. I like wrestling and cartoons and trying not to die. I used to like drawing but the inescapable weight of my depression squashed that like a pancake. Someday I would like to fix it, but for now all I can manage are the brief doodles on the side my notebook as if I were still 12 and none of this ever happened.

[my-dailydreams]

[mckitterick]

[rip-quizilla]

[guerrillatech]

[depsidase]

[theheroheart]

Elementary once again coming out in favour of polyamory. Bless this show.

[irregularjohnnywiggins]

Look, Elementary made a load of really smart adaptational decisions with the Holmes canon, but re-interpreting the Baker Street Irregulars as a group of hacktivists who delight in making Sherlock do weird and stupid shit is probably one of the best.

[srsfunny]

Goodluck Pikachu

[cryptotheism]

And the wisest monk said "young one, you reject the unenlightened ways of Hazbin Hotel, but not three years ago, I recall you posting twink Wheatley in great enthusiasm. You must not hate what you discard on the path to enlightenment. All of our old selves are within us, and we must imagine them lezzing out."

[cryptotheism]

"Funny" said the wisest monk "That cringe is whatever your gay ass was super into like three years ago."

"But master!" Said the young monk, "Did you not also post One Piece AMVs three years ago?"

"Luffy is badass." Said the master, "He has never been cringe."

[witch-from-a-block-of-flats]

The absolute BALLS you have to have to win 9 game awards, go on stage to claim the title of Game of the Year and say in your speech: "thank you to people who were making 'how to make games' tutorial on youtube, we couldn't have done it without you" and then instead of a idk sequel or paid DLC you announce a big update with new location, weapons, bosses and story and add "you can play it right now, for free". Never change Guillaume Broche, never fucking change <3

[onewingedangels]

THE GAME AWARDS 2025 | Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025) dev. Sandfall Interactive

[spacemanspiff91]

This immediately became one of my Top 10 games of all time. The music especially has blown me away. I am so glad to see this game get the praise it deserves.

[grumfy]

yeah actually we removed the big bad wolf from the little red riding hood story because portraying violence against minors is really messed up. yeah. yeah also the wolf narrative was really predatory and had had some icky grooming vibes and a fable meant for literal children shouldn’t have implied p*do shit and grape so now little red riding hood goes into the woods and nothing happens and she goes to grandma’s house. don’t worry our kids will still stick to the path and know not to follow to wolves implicitly because we told them to and children should always do as their told. just like little red riding hood does now.

[schlarklezyaoi]

the fact that we only have “herculean task” and “sisyphean task” feels so limiting. so here’s a few more tasks for your repertoire

icarian task: when you have a task you know you’re going to fail at anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down

cassandrean task: when you have to deal with people you KNOW won’t listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start (most often witnessed in customer service)

feel free to chime in i ran out of ideas much faster than i anticipated

[sherbertilluminated]

Promethean task: opposite of a Cassandraean task. You have the right information, and SOMEONE has to share it. But it's all in the delivery and if you're the person to identify the problem you WILL be hated forever.

[thearrogantemu]

Oedipal Task: (1) Attempting to avoid an unspeakably awful outcome and in doing so creating the circumstances that will bring it about. (2) Trying to solve an problem and discovering that you are in fact the problem you are trying to solve.

[theoppositeofprofound]

Odyssean task: you’ll complete it but it’ll take 20 times longer than it should and involve multiple side quests and mini-adventures

[ew-lour]

They De-Tumblrized Ms. Frizzle

[malaesthetic]

@transfagsculine​

#how do yall whitewash a white woman 

why would you leave this in the tags lmao

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

Allow me to explain:

[raevenlywrites]

Everyone dropping this pic

And talking about how the new frizz her is her niece, allow me to do a direct side by side instead

These are STILL not the same woman. Where is the icon fashion, the earrings (the chameleon, which might be in the new show idk I haven't watched it), the prominent hooked nose, the broader shoulders, the volume to her hair, the LIFE IN HER EYES

This frizzle looks like she's been called into the school board for inappropriate behavior and dress one too many times and has been broken.

Also others have said it before me but I couldn't find it in the scroll backs but they whitewashed all the kids too. They same face syndromed everyone to either be easier to draw or be more ambiguous so as not to offend or both or something, and it just makes me sad

[raevenlywrites]

Fuck it I did the digging cause I'm still mad

[amingethia]

And that’s not even to mention what they did to the bus itself.

The old bus had a personality and life and fun and now it’s just… a bus.

HOW DO Y’ALL WHITEWASH A BUS?!

[beforeliteracytherewasdeez]

It's gives "anti abortion Jehova's Witness cartoon" now

[therobotmonster]

Vector puppet animation and a shocking drop off in investment in kidvid is largely at fault, but international marketing is also to blame.

What's important to remember is that the whitewashy approach to character design in kidvid is a backslide.

Representation in cartoons had generally been on an upswing since the 1980s, even though efforts were often minimal, clumsy, or badly executed. Diversity helped sell action figures in the lucrative US/Canadian market and it was recognized as a prosocial value on the production side.

"Prosocial messages" are a major part of kidvid TV pitches and development, nearly every show has specific prosocial lessons the narrative themes are intended to work around, even if its an action-figure ad. These range from sincere expressions of the creator's intent (Gargoyles, OG Magic Schoolbus, OG He-Man (no, for real)) to the entertainment equivalent of carbon credits.

Slight aside. Actual ink-and-paint animation tended to lock characters down into more distinct tones because there were only so many standard paint colors. Which is why Kwame from Captain Planet, Roadblock from GI-Joe, and Tim from OG magic schoolbus all use essentially the same pantone.

Ralphie gets skinny because not only fatphobia, but I suspect because he would need slightly different rigging and would add just a teensy bit to the budget adjusting his animations when they could just copy-paste from one of the other identically built kids. If they need to put them all in spacesuits or diving suits or whatever, they just make the one body and slap the heads on, eazy-pezy.

Decals on the schoolbus mean they have to be tracked, they have to use different versions of the bus in flipped shots, same with Mrs. Frizzle's clothing patterns. Wouldn't want to spend time flipping Ralphie's "R' around.

And with the marketing for everything now being global, there's an impulse to average everything down to appeal to all markets to a general degree. Making stories oversimple makes them easy to translate. Humor varies culture to culture, keep it slapstick or quick quips that can be localized easily. Everything that makes the Chinese censor boards happy also makes US reactionaries less likely to kick up a protest, the incentive is to keep everything:

ALSO: These characters have the same face. They probably use the same eye and mouth parts for character animations.

It's all to do it as cheap and broadly appealing as possible, as determined by business weirdos who know nothing about art and care nothing about kids, and they're more than willing to leverage racism (or just ignore that its happening) for the promise of a tenth of a percent more profit.

And what's galling is that this kind of animation software doesn't have to make crap. It can be used to make amazing stuff and still be vastly cheaper than traditional hand-drawn, but the same quality at 60% of the cost is never going to beat 1/2 the quality at 5% of the cost for the money-men.

The path of least resistance rolls over a lot of people.

[pavilion-of-butterflies]

Reblogging for "the path of least resistance rolls over a lot of people"

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[derrickwildsun-deactivated20250]

That video of Alex Hirsch reading S&P notes for Gravity Falls conveys a few things to me:

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

4) conservatism, not the left, is and always has been the biggest voice of censorship in American culture.

[sci-fantasy]

J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, was before that a producer and writer for a number of cartoons in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s (The Real Ghostbusters and the original She-Ra, most notably). After a few years of dealing with the censors and their obsession with finding Satanism (or at least looking for Satanism to further political agendas) he wrote an article about the whole corrupt and bullshit system.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

(As he goes on to say, he’s never worked in animation again–he’s effectively been blacklisted by the cartoon industry.)

[transhuman-priestess]

Every time something like this comes up, I remember two stories about making media. The first is about movies, and comes from Quentin “Feet Man” Tarantino.

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

This is true of all censorship.

[brady-like-the-bunch]

I’ve been a professional designer for 8 years and that last bit is so true. In addition to politics, a huge part of people meddling with creative work is just ego. They want to feel like they had a hand in the final product, even though they not only did not create it but are in fact incapable of creating something on that level. So they reach their hand into someone else’s work and command it to change, not in service of a mutual artistic goal, but simply because they have the power to do so and they like feeling that power.

[wilwheaton]

“Now they’re kicking in doors, shooting pepper-gas balls into the open windows of cars driven by reporters, smashing windows and furniture, and concealing their faces and identities like the Klan did in days of old. In Chicago, they’ve shot two unarmed people, killing one. And there wasn’t a warrant signed by a judge to be seen anywhere. People ask, “Are we there, yet? Has America gone fascist? Are we now in a militarized dictatorship?” Last week’s illegal, unconstitutional military assault on an apartment building in Chicago argues “Yes.” And if it doesn’t stimulate a similar level of public outrage as the Kimmel suspension did, we’re all screwed.”

— It’s time for state authorities to start making arrests…

[wilwheaton]

“Trump, Vance, Hegseth, and Noem carefully selected a low-income apartment building filled with Black and Hispanic people, correctly believing that the American mainstream media wouldn’t give it the coverage they would if ICE and our military had instead kicked in the doors of a building full of middle-class white people. Soldiers rappelled from Blackhawk helicopters as some 300 masked agents ran throughout the apartment building kicking in doors, dragging American citizens out (including near-naked children) into the street and zip-tying them for hours. They then trashed multiple apartments, ripping up furniture, smashing windows, breaking & scattering possessions, and removing and carting away phones and laptops. No warrants signed by judges were presented and one ICE thug, when asked about the shivering American citizen kids standing in the freezing cold, said, “Fuck the children.””

—

It’s time for state authorities to start making arrests…

Fuck these Fascists. ICE are scumbag domestic terrorists who should all be prosecuted for their heinous crimes.

[wilwheaton]