#gelatinocomics

[ponett]

You didn't expound on it in your article, but I'm glad you watched Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, my favorite trek movie. It's so tonally different from the others, I could hardly believe what I was seeing the first time I watched it. I got to share it with friends during our trek watch-through this year, and we still bring up "The Whale Incident" from time to time.

I actually watched ALL of the Star Trek movies, since I was in a Trek mood while watching DS9 and that was an easy excuse to spend some time with the TOS and TNG casts without pausing DS9 to go back and watch those entire series. I wrote little reviews of each on Letterboxd and then compiled them into a blog post here

But anyway yeah, I kind of go back and forth on whether I think IV or VI is the best movie, but IV is absolutely the most fun. Just extremely funny and goofy and charming throughout while still also sincerely believing its outlandish premise that lacks a traditional villain is cool—which it is! I wish more Trek movies that came after were just trying to tell fun and novel sci-fi stories like that instead of reheating Wrath of Khan's leftovers endlessly

[artemispanthar]

I just got caught up on Pluribus, and immediately came to your blog. I knew I could count on you to be posting about it!

That statement Vince made about AI makes a lot of sense to me, because I can't help but see this whole apocalyptic scenario as an allegory for the current state of tech. The way the Others talk just reminds me a little too much of a chat bot that is too eager to hype you up and tries to anticipate your needs, careful to avoid saying anything that might displease you.

Yeah! It's interesting because I watched a few interviews (namely the PaleyFest one) where Gilligan was asked whether it was about AI and he said that he initially started writing it a decade ago before ChatGPT became a thing so he wasn't setting out to make an AI allegory but wanted people to have their own theories. Which bananas to me because like you said, it really readily reads as AI allegory or at least draws inspiration from AI and chat bots. I suppose chat bots were a thing for a long time before the AI boom and also TV is a collaborative medium so there are multiple writers so it seems likely that someone was probably drawing a little bit from experience with sycophantic chat bots.

Especially in the most recent episode ("Please, Carol") when Carol is talking to that guy (forget his name but he's played by Jeff Hiller) and asking what the Others think about her books and he's like "we love them!" And she's like "which ones?" "All of them!" "What do you like about them?" "Everything!" "What about the themes?" "We love the themes" "No what specific themes did you like, what about them did you like" etc which is so very much like fighting with a chatbot to give you a straight answer lol and not being about to give any details other than the very surface level stuff.

Though I will say I did like their answer that they think the books are great because (for example) one woman loved them so much they gave her a reason to live, which us honestly such a great point re: subjective art but that's a totally separate discussion from the AI stuff so I won't go off on a tangent about that now lol

But yeah regardless of whether it's intentionally (or consciously intentional) or not it really does feel like at least partial commentary on AI or like you said the current state of tech in general. Perhaps once we're further into it and know more it will feel less like that but right now that's definitely how it reads

[realtimefanduboutofcontext]

How do you get the captions in your clips to look so nice? :O (I wrote the subtitles for the KH fandub, and it makes me happy to see them formatted nicely. It annoys me to no end that youtube sometimes displays them incorrectly)

HI!! First of all thank you for all your hard work :D

the rest of y'all, this is technical knowledge so I'm gonna nerd out a bit. open the cut for the long answer

For subtitles on this account:

I use Premiere Pro to cut clips and I use the caption track to automatically set the text into one of a few styles I've set up. Here's what that looks like normally:

at time of writing, my subtitles are usually set to the following parameters:

font: Helvetica Neue Condensed Bold at 65px

colors: white text with a black stroke of 10

position: at the bottom center, -61.5 pixels above the bottom of the frame

line spacing: -10px

I often color code the subtitles for interactions with more than three characters or where it isn't obvious who's speaking, and have a separate italic style for off-screen dialogue.

I may change the stroke for a block background or a soft shadow depending on how much detail is behind the text.

for Do No Harm, I specifically borrowed the subtitle file from the video and placed it into the video. I do these burned into the video because platforms like Bluesky (and formerly Twitter) aren't good at displaying closed captions, and Tumblr doesn't do closed captions at all.

As for bringing those out to YouTube

(yes I do post videos to YouTube, here's my YouTube channel) I generally find that I'm able to preserve some minimal formatting when I bring these out to YouTube by exporting the subtitle file as an SRT file - it only preserves bold, italics and/or underlining to my knowledge.

the supercut of classic Real-Time Fandub is a good example of this

I've found that using other programs like Subtitle Edit and Aegisub is good for more complex stuff like color coding, animation or positioning! I use these here and here (Aegisub) and here (Subtitle Edit). one must make sure to only edit the subtitles in their respective apps (or in a notes app if you know what you're doing), otherwise it will generally break the formatting if you edit it in YouTube Studio.

[onenicebugperday]

Flies are such underrated bugs. They come in so many shiny and colorful varieties. Even the common housefly is so delightfully bean shaped. If you have any favorite fly pictures, I would love to see them

YES THEY’RE SO GOOD. I would check out this search, which is my daily featured bugs that happened to be flies:

https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/onenicebugperday/search/one%20nice%20bug%20fly

Some other bugs whose posts happened to have the word “fly” in them will show up but just consider those a bonus ;)

[morphimus]

2, 4, 5, and 8

Ack! Tumblr has been glitching out and not showing me notifications so I didn't see these asks until now.

End of the Year Asks

2: Album of the year? Choosing to interpret this as the album I listened to most, found out about, and/or that especially stood out to me this year, rather than one that came out this year.

Umeko Ando - イフンケ This is an album of traditional music from an often overlooked ethnic group in Japan, the Ainu. The first song on this album was featured in Samurai Champloo.

4: Movie of the year?

Animal Crossing: The Movie / 劇場版どうぶつの森 It's a Japan-exclusive 2006 film based on the game Animal Crossing, that I happened to watch this year. I really enjoyed the laid-back feel of this film, it felt very nostalgic, like visiting old friends.

5: TV show of the year?

Bocchi the Rock! This one actually did come out this year! A show about A girl who joins a band. This show is fun, and deeply relatable for recluses and introverts like me. I highly recommend it.

8: Game of the year?

20 Minutes Till Dawn Overhead shooter where you fight a growing onslaught of eldritch monsters using guns and magic. The unique characters, weapons, and unlockable powers, combined with the addictive 20 minute survival core gameplay kept me HOOKED on this game. It's still in early access, so the game has been getting updates, bugfixes, and new features frequently, which I see as a big plus, honestly. Buy it on Steam for 5 bucks (It's on sale for $4.24 at time of posting this!) It's really good.

(Send me more asks before the year is over! Or after I'm not a cop)

[mylittlefusions]

(sibling) Fluttershy and Zephyr please

zephyr finally experiences a coherent thought (2020, colorized)

[ponydoodles]

Okay here's a very self-indulgent headcanon, fluttershy and twilight are both autistic and they infodump to each other a lot about their interests! Also fluttershy spends time at twilight's library to read books about animals

after a long day they both headed back to the library to relax, and now fluttershy is telling twilight all about a really cool bird she just read about! :>

[equestrias-little-ones]

I'd really like to see a pinkie/skystar kid

I’ve seen a lot of Pegasus and Hippogriff babies and??? Gimme fluffy pony kids!!!!!