dorsalus

[dorsalus]

BELUGA BABE

[dorsalus]

Jupiter is a deepfake, got it.

NASA has released new images of Jupiter, taken by the Juno Spacecraft.

[dorsalus]

“Hello,” she said in a voice so husky it could pull a dogsled.

[dorsalus]

Вставай, скоро молоко раздавать будут!…

[dorsalus]

It’s cute when people claim that Lovecraft was racist because of the era he was born in. Dude was the most prolific letter writer in American history. We have letters from other racists asking him to tone down the racism. The man was considered breathtakingly racist by the people of his own time.

[dorsalus]

latin word of the day: arborescere, to become a tree, to grow to be a tree

[dorsalus]

Here’s a little trick I’ve used in D&D games where the premise of your campaign calls for the party to have access to lots of Stuff, but you don’t want to do a whole bunch of bookkeeping: the Wagon.

In a nutshell, the party has a horse-drawn wagon that they use to get around between – and often during – adventures. This doesn’t come out of any individual player character’s starting budget; it’s just provided as part of the campaign premise.

Before setting out from a town or other place of rest, the party has to decide how many gold pieces they want to spend on supplies. These funds aren’t spent on anything in particular, and form a running total that represents how much Stuff is in the wagon.

Any time a player character needs something in the way of supplies during a journey or adventure, one of two things can happen:

1. If it’s something that any fool would have packed for the trip and it’s something that could reasonably have been obtained at one of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., rations, spare clothing, fifty feet of rope, etc.), then the wagon contains as much of it as they reasonably need. Just deduct the Player’s Handbook list price for the item(s) in question from the wagon’s total.

2. If it’s something where having packed it would take some explaining, or if it’s something that’s unlikely to have been available for purchase at any of the party’s recent stopovers (e.g., a telescope, a barrel of fine wine, a book of dwarven erotic poetry, etc.), the player in need makes a retroactive Intelligence or Wisdom check, versus a DC set by the GM, to see if they somehow anticipated the need for the item(s) in question. Proficiency may apply to this check, depending on what’s needed. The results are read as follows:

Success: You find what you’re looking for, more or less. If the group is amenable, you can narrate a brief flashback explaining the circumstances of its acquisition. Deduct its list price (or a price set by the GM, if it’s not on the list) from the wagon’s total.

Failure by 5 points or less: You find something sort of close to what you’re looking for. The GM decides exactly what; it won’t ever be useless for the purpose at hand, but depending on her current level of whimsy, it may simply be a lesser version of what you were looking for, or it may be something creatively off the mark. Deduct and optionally flash back as above.

Failure by more than 5 points: You come up empty-handed, and can’t try again for that item or anything closely resembling it until after your next stopover.

As an incidental benefit, all the junk the wagon is carrying acts as a sort of ablative armour. If the wagon or its horses would ever take damage, instead subtract a number of gold pieces from its total equal to the number of hit points of damage it would have suffered. The GM is encouraged to describe what’s been destroyed in lurid detail.

[dorsalus]

[dorsalus]

Part of me wants to shift the entirety of Magical Fantasy Adventure Land into the normal world instead of splitting it into a separate realm.

Part of me is still annoyed that this fucker still doesn’t have a proper title. Or at least something that sounds better as a place holder.

[dorsalus]

[dorsalus]

the golden rule: if the media pushes something, be very skeptical.

[dorsalus]

watch the whole thing, i’m begging you

[dorsalus]

can we please stop reblogging that post about david bowie being a p-dophile because he supposedly slept with an underage groupie

the groupie, lori mattix, said in an interview with thrillist that she lost her virginity to him in 1973 when she was 15. but in an earlier interview with paul trynka, she claimed it happened in october 1972 when she was only 14. she also completely changed the narrative, first saying she snuck into his hotel room and later deciding he approached her at a restaurant. 

also, according to another ex-groupie, she was confirmed in a relationship with jimmy page in the summer of 1972, well before bowie ever toured in california, where she lived.

he was pretty vocal about his stance against p-dophilia as he wrote “shopping for girls” about child trafficking in thailand, threatened to fire his drummer for sending teenage girls to his hotel room, and refused to perform the kiss scene written into the movie labyrinth because jennifer connelly was 14 at the time.

its good to fact check before spreading accusations as serious as this, especially about an activist who campaigned against racism against aboriginal people in australia, openly criticized MTV for not playing music videos by black artists, and, with his wife iman, donated millions of dollars to various human rights organizations in the third world.

[dorsalus]

Where’s the beef you cowards

[dorsalus]

“How to Art?”

“Hey man that’s not bad!”

“It’s not that great!”

“No it’s good man!”

“Maybe though, add some shading around where the head shadows the neck.”

“Make sure you it’s obvious where the light source is coming from.”

“It will help give the drawing more volume and depth.”

“Whoa! You’re really good at art, man!”

[dorsalus]

The thing about how women in comics used to be drawn and sometimes are still drawn, you can only really understand the difference between an action girl being forced into unrealistic sexual, sensual positions, and an actual strong and well posed, empowering but still sexy female character, when you see what it looks like to have male characters depicted in overtly sensual poses

And I’m not talking about the Hawkeye Initiative or any given parody

I actually want to draw a comparison using art by Kevin Wada

Kevin Wada is a proud part of the LGBTQ+ community and he has this unique ability to sexualize mainstream male heroes without it looking like a parody. He draws covers for multiple big comic companies and his style reminiscent of old fashion magazines, drawn largely in traditional watercolor, has made him a stalwart of the industry.

He also draws a lot of naked Bucky Barnes.

Anyway, I want to talk about how interesting his art is, the difference between his power poses and his sexy poses for male and female characters.

A typical power pose for a male comics character would look like this

Whereas every so often with female heroes you get something like this

Not all the time, of course, but it happens and it happens in the wrong places. You wouldn’t be posing like a cover model in the middle of a battle, you really wouldn’t.

But when it comes to Wada and male and female characters, the difference is pretty clear.

When he draws male characters, they more often look like this

Sensual, in a pose you wouldn’t usually see a big, muscular hero doing. If not that, then playful, sexy, for looking at, but nothing about their anatomy overly exaggerated

How he draws women is also very clearly different from many other artists, from sexy pose to power pose.

Still posing for the camera, still to be looked at, but very, very different from how we’ve seen female characters portrayed in mainstream comics in the past.

And I guess it’s really just a matter of variety? Objectification in art is a long time debate and appears everywhere always, but for all that we can argue about its impact on popular media, there are a few things I know for sure:

1) having a female character pose like a playboy cover girl in the middle of a battle scene is just Bad Art and y'all need to find better references

2) female power poses will never look quite as right as when they’re drawn by people who know the value of expressing personality through pose (it’s basic animation principles and some artists still need to learn it) and who actually know what a female character’s personality beyond “sexy”

3) Iron Man or Batman posing like they’re about to beat somebody up is 100% not the same as a fashion drawing by Kevin Wada where a Typical Beefy Action Guy gets to pose like a flirty pretty boy

4) the MCU films have figured out the value of pandering to female audiences by sexually objectifying all their male action heroes while simultaneously appealing to the male demographic’s action movie power fantasy. Quoting Chris Hemsworth and Taika Waititi: “I’m not a piece of meat” “Uh, yes you are.”

They definitely struck some kind of balance there.

Also, more important than this entire post: y'all should follow @kevinwada on Tumblr and give him love because his art is divine and his talent beyond words