brikit

[brikit]

I got my boys (now 4 and 6 -- where does the time go?) back into MLP recently, and then drew a gift for a friend. My 4yo immediately asked me to draw him Twilight Sparkle...with the Ursa Minor.

I’ll color this later. Things the 4yo definitely does not care about: the Ursa Minor is slightly transparent, so the background should be visible through him. Things I will be annoyed about if I don’t do it: That thing I just said.

Apparently I will always make more work for myself. Some things never change.

[brikit]

[brikit]

My theory is that every massive Kel fan is also Kel. So focused on our own mission to repress/hide emotions and get tasks finished that we're pretty blind to what the people closest to us might actually be picking up on. 😂

It took me twenty years to realize this. Twenty. Years.

So. I've been obsessively listening to the Protector of the Small books lately. (Sarah Ovens does a lovely job.)

And the last time I got to Page, I started to wonder if Neal was as oblivious to Kel's crush as she seemed to think. Yes, she's supposed to be this hidden emotion master, but she is, after all, 11 years old when she suddenly starts feeling this way, and gets twitchy and slightly blushy around him sometimes...and no matter how you spin it, Neal is 16. He's lived more life, went to the university for a few years, has a bunch of siblings...I just can't see how Neal didn't realize Kel had a crush on him. Especially when he noticed Cleon's crush on Kel.

But, like any decent friend who is also much much older, he just ignored it, because that's what good friends do when they notice something they know the other person desperately doesn't want you to notice.

[brikit]

So. I've been obsessively listening to the Protector of the Small books lately. (Sarah Ovens does a lovely job.)

And the last time I got to Page, I started to wonder if Neal was as oblivious to Kel's crush as she seemed to think. Yes, she's supposed to be this hidden emotion master, but she is, after all, 11 years old when she suddenly starts feeling this way, and gets twitchy and slightly blushy around him sometimes...and no matter how you spin it, Neal is 16. He's lived more life, went to the university for a few years, has a bunch of siblings...I just can't see how Neal didn't realize Kel had a crush on him. Especially when he noticed Cleon's crush on Kel.

But, like any decent friend who is also much much older, he just ignored it, because that's what good friends do when they notice something they know the other person desperately doesn't want you to notice.

[brikit]

So I finally started watching Schitt’s Creek properly (I tried it a few years ago and it didn’t fully grab me).

I’ve been laid up with a badly sprained ankle, so I’ve been consuming a lot of tv.

I have fallen in love with this weird family and have been moved to tears on multiple occasions.

[brikit]

August 3rd is Mamoru Chiba/Tuxedo Mask’s Birthday!

So how can you celebrate?

🌹 Rewatch or reread your favourite Tux-centric chapter, episode, or musical! As a key character from the very first episode, he features prominently throughout the series. Some highlights include episode 034, where he accepts a challenge from Zoisite and reveals both his past and his true identity to Sailor Moon; episode 053, where he and Usagi babysit a toddler together; episode 116, where he takes Chibi-Usa and Usagi on a family outing that ends in disaster; episode 132, where a friendship with one of his female peers sparks jealousy in a mutual friend; episode 136, where his apartment is closed for deep-cleaning and he is forced to stay at the Hikawa Shrine; or episode 165, where he is taken to the capital of his ancient kingdom, Elysion, to meet with the priest Helios. He is the impetus of the plot in Sailor Moon R: The Movie, and features in the quasi-parody Episode Zero short from the 2003 live action, The Secret of Tuxedo Mask’s Birth.

🌹 Tuxedo Mask has several official image songs across different canons you can play for his big day:

90s anime: Dakishimete Itai [“I Want To Embrace You”]; Toki wo Koete… [“Crossing Time…”]; YOU ARE JUST MY LOVE (duet with Usagi Tsukino/Sailor Moon); Crystal: Kimi no Hitomi no MOONRISE [”The Moonrise in Your Eyes”]; Eien Dake ga Futari wo Kakeru [”Only Eternity Can Link Us”]; Musicals: TUXEDO MISSION. Additionally, his 90s voice actor, Tohru Furuya, recorded the song EVERLASTING MY LOVE, which he has stated to be about the time-spanning love between Usagi and Tuxedo Mask, and is dedicated to all his supportive female fans.

Here’s a playlist of all these songs and other Tuxedo Mask BGM cues!

🌹 Mamoru’s favourite food is simply “chocolate,” so today is the perfect excuse to indulge. Try some rose-flavoured truffles, or mature dark chocolate to match his refined tastes. He is also consistently associated with coffee in the various official pop-up and permanent Sailor Moon cafes, possibly because of his sophisticated image, or possibly because he’s a grad student running on caffeine and spite. Why not combine the two with a brooding mocha?

🌹 As an egg-head, Mamoru’s hobbies are generally intellectual, enjoying reading, analysing poetry, and studying foreign languages, so consider patronising your local library.

As Earth’s guardian he also likes flowers and nature, particularly, to no one’s surprise, roses, so a stroll through your local botanical park or community garden would be perfect.

On his other extreme, he also has a taste for luxury cars and riding motor cycles. If renting a bike or dirt bike for a spin isn’t your thing, maybe you could visit the arcade for a virtual race instead.

And it should come as no shock that a man who elects to fight crime in a three-piece suit and tophat has a taste for the dramatic, so since Mamoru has volunteered for community theatre in the past, why not see a local performance? Maybe… Snow White?

🌹 Dress like Mamoru for the day, if you can stomach it! As a young man in the 90s with no one to help dress him, he had a hard time navigating through the pitfalls of late-20th century men’s fashion. Still, he favoured business-casual blazers over turtlenecks or T-shirts, and when dressing more comfortably opted for bold, layered colour-blocking or graphic prints. As the series went on, and in the manga or Crystal, he dressed more classically, opting for simple button-up shirts and slacks in warm or earth-tones, occasionally favouring a Chandler Bing vest. When brainwashed, all bets were off, so if you have anything cow-print today is absolutely the time to bust it out.

His most iconic outfits were definitely his eponymous tuxedo and his green blazer/black undershirt/grurple (grey-purple) slacks/saddle shoes - or you could dress head-to-toe in lavender, like his fit as future King of the World. He’s also frequently seen with an enormous pair of sunglasses.

🌹 Get brainwashed!!

🌹 Make a puppet version of yourself!

🌹 Reflect on some of the wisdom Tuxedo Mask has dropped in all of his flowery (pun intended) speeches over at @tuxedowisdom.

🌹 Go thrifting for some absolutely absurd and fairly hideous decor. He collects souvenirs, posters, and other decorations related to space and the solar system, as well as minerals and gemstones.

🌹 Fav and read some Tuxedo Mask fanart and fanfic on sites like Pixiv, Twitter, and AO3 - or contribute your own new content! Don’t forget to tag!

Feel free to reply and reblog with your own ideas of how you’re going to celebrate the walking meme that is Mamoru Chiba!

Happy Birthday, Mamo!

[brikit]

It’s been a while, Tumblr. Let’s try you again.

[brikit]

HEY THIS IS IMPORTANT whats your favorite place to find drawing references?

[brikit]

I just saw Shazam! and it made me so happy. It also dredged up my desire to go back to school, get a master’s in art history, and focus my studies on the evolution and effect of comic books.

[brikit]

Lol wow. I come onto Tumblr for the first time in a while to find a flagged post. It was that time that a nurse murdered my arm drawing blood.

Guess what, robot — that’s not adult content. 🙄

[brikit]

Big sister drops to her knees to show affection to newborn Photo by James Irwin

[brikit]

American cartoons animated by Japanese studios and the hybrid art style that results is EXTREMELY my aesthetic and the basis for my art style - a post

I’ve been nerding out about this on twitter all day but I wanted to make a post here about it too - people often cite my work as reminding them of things like Lupin the 3rd and Cybersix, and honestly, I”m not surprised. 

But do you know why?

Its because both shows were animated by a little (and by little I mean one of the oldest animation studios in Japan) animation studio by the name of Tokyo Movie Shinsha (as they were known up until the 2000s, and are now known as TMS Entertainment).

TMS is responsible for a really large chunk of my favorite animated media growing up. They are my biggest inspiration both animation and art style wise. I’m honestly completely infatuated with the hybrid style that was created in the 80s and 90s as a result of Japanese animation studios being outsourced to do American cartoons in general, but TMS really stands out as being the masters of this.

Examples

Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland (1989)

This movie went through distributor hell, falling through the hands of WB, Disney and various others. But it had an American director and was animated by TMS studio under the instruction of using a western style. Its initial release was in Japan. To this day no one really knows who owns the film property. But its one of the most shining examples of Japanese > American hybrid animation to this day and is the most prolific in making kids SWEAR this movie was anime, only to watch it again as adults and be totally confused. lmao. It’s my favorite animated film of all time.

Galaxy High School (1986)

 This cartoon aired on the American CBS network in 1986, and was created and mostly written by Chris Columbus. It was also animated by TMS. This show sports some of the cutest animation I’ve ever seen out of TMS studio - they seemed to be given slightly more leeway on how “Japanese” it was allowed to look, despite being provided model sheets by the American character designers. This show has BIG BIG hints of Lupin throughout - mostly showcased in how the expressions, movement and especially the various running/chase scenes are animated. This show has the absolute /perfect/ blend of Japanese > American hybrid cartoon animation style, in my personal opinion. One of my absolute favorites.

Cybersix (1999)

Cybersix was a Canadian production, originally airing on the Teletoon Network in 1999. And what do you know, yet again animated by TMS studio! This show was an absolute staple of my teenhood. Not just for its gorgeous style and characters that would very clearly influence my work for years to come, but also its themes - its probably the only show I’ve ever seen to feature a truly genderfluid character, and handles gender identity with such care I’ve NEVER seen in a TV show since. This is a classy show. The animation is always breathtaking, and never skips a beat. Sadly though, due to some conflicts between production studios, the second 13 episode season never went into production, so the series is left on a bit of a cliffhanger. Still, I can not stress enough how this is a show NOT to be looked over. Its more than worth a watch.

The Real Ghostbusters (1986)

The production of this show is kind of a huge roller coaster ride that seasoned Ghostbusters fans have WAY more knowledge of and have covered it in way more detail already than I ever could ( @phelous has some great videos on his youtube channel that are worth a watch) - but it is worth noting that I had to do some slight sleuthing to discover that TMS is YET AGAIN responsible for the animation for the first 5 seasons of this show (with a Korean animation studio doing the last two) - as only DiC is credited with the production almost everywhere you look. But it’s not all that hard to see the CLEAR signs of this show being animated by a Japanese studio. The hybrid style is very prevalent here. Again, this is a show I REALLY enjoyed thoroughly as a kid due to its style and characters. I swear, I think I was just really hard wired to be drawn to TMS’ art style. lol.

These are my favorite examples. TMS is also responsible for some of my other favorite shows growing up such as Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog, Inspector Gadget (under the DiC label), Ducktales, Rescue Rangers, and Gargoyles (under the Disney label), and Animaniacs (under the WB label). Most of my absolute FAVORITE western TMS productions were done under the Telecom Animation Film label.

Some of my favorite anime productions of all time were done by TMS too, such as Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (yes, the animated film with the most frames per second of all time and some of the most gorgeous animation ever put on screen), MOST installments of Lupin the 3rd, Tetsujin 28-go, Ashita no Joe, Detective Conan, Space Adventure Cobra, Magic Knight Rayearth, and tons more.

(And trust me, I do understand the underlying negative implications of what it means to outsource animation in asian countries. I of course don’t EVER support the abysmal treatment and underpaying of animators in Japan.)

But I do want to pay my respects to these animators, because whether they know it or not, they created something really wonderful in this process that I admire and am extremely inspired by.

In my opinion, TMS deserves the same amount of respect and notoriety as the likes of studio Ghibli. 

So yes, whenever someone sends me an ask “hey, your style reminds me of (insert TMS show here) - and its always these shows they point out, lol - I’m just going to direct them to this post.

I can’t stress enough just how clearly this style has influenced my own. I hope you all can see it now. lol. 

Thanks for reading and taking this time to geek out about animation aesthetics with me. ;;; I’d also love to hear about any shows you love/loved as a kid that feature this Japanese > American animation style in the replies to this post! 

[brikit]

My bros I have been doing a lot of reading about Wacky WWII Hijinks lately and I want to tell you a story because I love it okay

once upon a time there was a dude in Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol hated him some goddamn fascists.

See Spain had recently ended its civil war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty bullshit

so soon after war breaks out Pujol travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on the Nazis for you”

“who the fuck are you?” say the British, and kick him out

but Pujol is not deterred! He still wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”

“yeah okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”

and just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England

Pujol had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books and set about just wholesale making shit up

this is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen, because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so that’s probably the same right?

Here is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves this. “wow this dude is a great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new awesome spy that the British start to get worried

you see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England. The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies

so there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail

“oh shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they have to and from this mysterious super spy.

“hey wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending. “someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”

At this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we know that guy”

so in 1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case officer so he can start making up even better bullshit

and he does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+ sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK

none of these people actually exist

Pujol just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents

Pujol, now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended

crazily enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent. After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which require personal authorization from Hitler), and a Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)

unable to resist being totally fucking ridiculous, Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”

and that’s exactly what he did. Juan Garcia Pujol died in 1988, at the age of 76

[brikit]

if anyone asks me where my sense of humor comes from im just gonna show them the 90s sailor moon dub

[brikit]

Nothing quite like being so emotionally exhausted from your three-year-old being an embarrassing, screaming jackass when you’re at Tesco that you start drowsing getting the baby to sleep.

I need coffee.

[brikit]

I need this for Nicholas. Grab’n’go baby!

[brikit]

My three-year-old thinks snails are the coolest. He’s not wrong.