femboycatofmystery

[femboycatofmystery]

As someone with a lifelong Weird Thing For Corvette Stingrays I find this just profoundly unsettling

BMW's concept car: give it a carussy and a gear shift that looks like a clit. men aren't gonna know how to drive this thing

[femboycatofmystery]

I’m turning into a cartoon wolf and making train whistle noises

[femboycatofmystery]

Feelings Boss Fight

Storytelling concept: Feelings Boss Fight.

You have a character. They are going through things and developing. But how do you show growth? One scene for this is the Feelings Boss Fight.

A Boss Fight in a video game is designed to test the player's knowledge of skills. Did you learn double jumps? Did you practice dodging? Do you have reflexes trained on an attack pattern, or a jump puzzle type? When you did X before, did you learn? The perfect boss fight is one that the player wins-- but which they wouldn't have won if not for the hour of gameplay preceding it, where they failed to reach a ledge, dodge an attack, exploit an opening. Now they know how to do it, and they win.

Now, write that. Set up an encounter that will show what the character has learned. It can be an encounter with anyone, or anything. This is not necessarily a fight scene or even an argument. It might be as simple as making a right choice where before they might have made the wrong one.

Now travel back in time and write the character's other experiences as training for that moment. Have they run from danger in the past, only to have it get worse instead of better? Perhaps they have been hiding their frustrations about a situation and watched as every attempt to keep the peace has only made more trouble. Whatever the issue is, your character made a wrong decision before and saw the consequences. You can layer this. A single action could be made in multiple contexts, and all of them can point in the same direction. You ran away when you should have run through. You feared when you should have trusted. Trusted when you should have questioned. What if you could do one thing that showed you knew all three of those things?

That's the Feelings Boss Fight. Let the character show the audience how much they have learned. How far they have come.

[femboycatofmystery]

The Blender Open Movies

What you're looking at is a playlist of the Blender Open Movies, a series of projects which have been one part technical demonstration, one part weird Dutch arthouse cinema, and one part live QA test. And as this is tumblr, I would like to yell at you about it for a while.

Blender and its Foundation

Fifteen years ago, Blender was not nearly so well known as it is now, and it was a far quirkier, far more baffling program to use. To give you some sense of the weirdness, it used to open with a top-down view that made it hard to tell what exactly what you were looking at, you selected objects with right click, and to whatever extent you might think of there being graphical elements that show you what you can do at any point, were absent. Instead you had keyboard shortcuts, and the wiki. The software was obtuse as hell, painful to use, and ridiculously confusing.

Those of you saying "nothing's changed then", I want you to imagine everything you hate about Blender's UX and multiply it by a thousand. It was that bad.

But the developers behind Blender, a group of Dutch software developers who had bought Blender from their own parent company through a fundraising campaign, made two crucial decisions:

First, rather than becoming a conventional software company and competing with Maya and C4D directly, they made the project Open Source, permanently free to use by anyone, under a legal framework that makes it legally impossible for them to ever charge anyone for it.

Second, and in my view the real secret sauce of Blender's success: the Blender Open Movies.

Build the Bike Underneath Yourself

The developers of Blender use a "content driven development" model, meaning that like Pixar, they are always making animations, and also like Pixar, they are using what they learn to make the software better.

This means that the Blender Foundation doesn't just hire programmers, it hires 3D artists. And then it puts them in the same building with the software developers, and the two groups cooperate to get the software to do as much as it can.

The result is that you start with something kind of dreadful-looking like The Elephant's Dream and end up with gorgeous shorts like Spring. It also means that the interface has been improving year over year for all fifteen of those years, and it shows. Blender still has some pitfalls in its interface, but at this point, more than half of them are caused by the fact that creating 3D art is just hard.

In addition to becoming (less) user-hostile, Blender has become spectacularly, game-breakingly powerful. Unlike most other 3D software, Blender contains everything you need to make 3D animations, inside the software itself. Some tools are not the best in the business, but everything at least exists and can get the job done.

This format has even inspired other studios to become contributing members of the project. One such studio in Spain created Hero, and along with it a collection of mods which eventually became the official tool, Grease Pencil, a way to merge 3D and 2D art styles in the same workspace.

Weird Dutch Animation

One thing you'll notice about the Blender Open Movies is that they are often weird, dark, and quirky. Some of them could frankly use some content warnings. The 3D artists that make up the Blender Studio are an odd bunch, and any time one comes out I think "ok is this going to be one I can show people and tell them they should try this software or am I going to have to stick with Spring for now" because in a general audience, these aren't always great narrative first impressions.

Stories from these films have included stuff like (this paragraph will just be a litany of the dark shit in the movies so you can skip it if you like, or use it to get a sense of what you're in for...) ambiguously fatal head trauma, a dragon getting knifed and blood going everywhere, a sheep trying to hang himself (and the voice acting is pretty upsetting tbh), campers getting murdered by smurf knockoffs, you get the picture.

These days the studio has been trying to keep its offerings a little easier to pass around in mixed company, but every now and then they make something like Sprite Fright and I think "ahhhh, there we go, that's my Dark Blender Studio..."

And as much as I sometimes wish I could pass around this playlist without caveats, I do feel there's value in the art they're doing-- a lot of the weirder films are, despite existing in large part as a tool to make 3D software better, the sort of thing that wouldn't get made by other means. And indeed, they light the way for yet more animation that wouldn't exist without Blender.

The Barrier Has Never Been Lower

What still excites me about Blender to this day is that it keeps proving its value by being the underlying framework that independent artists use to go far beyond what they would be able to afford to do otherwise. Ian Hubert makes live-action films with CGI that reads as only a few steps back from Marvel, This Guy is making a whole weird universe of hard to look at but weirdly impressive monsters, and 87render is making some of the most gorgeous Transformers fan film I've ever seen.

Because Blender is free, and cannot be made un-free, artists can trust it to be there tomorrow. And with stability comes dedication, and with dedication, you get what we have now, an entire ecosystem of creatives making things that just wouldn't happen otherwise.

I felt like a call to action at the end of this would read as annoying, but I do think it's worth a try, even if you tried it a few years ago and it didn't click. It keeps changing, and it keeps getting better. The Blender Open Movies have made sure of that.

[femboycatofmystery]

Fungi are super sus. Like just sort of. Standing around. Eating food. Pretending to be plants. Half of them manufacture hard drugs instead of being conventionally poisonous and the ones that are conventionally poisonous are all trying to get creative with it like Destroying Angel making your genes stop working. This is all highly suspect.

Honestly bizarre that tomatoes get all the flack for “not being a vegetable” because they're technically a fruit when:

A) There are a ton of fruits that get categorised as vegetables. Like this also applies to pumpkins, squashes and cucumbers.

B) The fucking mushrooms are standing there at the back of the crowd in this witch trial, trying to look inconspicuous because they somehow got into the vegetable club with no fucking controversy despite the fact that they're not even plants.

[femboycatofmystery]

whadre you guys talking about we totally have to fight a snake

Google AI Overview

Yes, some universities have a tradition of including a "snake fight" portion in thesis defenses, where students fight one of the university's snakes. The quality of the student's thesis determines the size of the snake they must fight, with better theses resulting in smaller snakes. After the committee reads the thesis, they tell the snake master how good it is, who then chooses the snake. In some northern European countries, an external examiner called the "opponent" fights the snake on the student's behalf, with the opponent's skill level based on the thesis's quality.

[femboycatofmystery]

[femboycatofmystery]

I made so many bad decisions that eventually I was just wading through the Consequences Of My Actions constantly and ok yeah I may currently have just switched from "wading through" to "running away from" but also I am trying to not make the stampede behind me, ok, us, from getting larger

I still stand by everything I said but I must grudgingly admit that the part where I made a pact with a demon was off sides and yes he still technically owns me but maybe I can become good enough that I start to gross him out?

Character who was doing heinous acts mostly to prove how cool they were to The Extremely Wrong Crowd suddenly realizes that the hero is BETTER AT COOL FLIPS N SHIT THAN THEY ARE and go from following them around like a lovesick puppy to aggressively angry at how "easy" this comes to them to oh wait that WAS the wrong crowd for me to be taking orders from, that makes total sense, ok but show me the knife thing again, I cannot figure out the knife thing and it is KILLING ME

The Bully has a profoundly difficult time figuring out that the real problem is their parents, to the point where the narrative is beating them over the head with it, repeatedly, until eventually it's like they're literally dressed up in their dad's Evil Outfit about to Evil Plan again and then they have a personal revelation that is SO EMBARASSING because of how long it took that they nearly implode from pure uncut cringe

Literally only not a hero of the story because there's one tiny thing that they don't know that virtually everyone else does BUT nobody knows that knowing that would change anything, until it does, at which point there's a very loud WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T YOU TELL ME THIS scene followed by a face-turn that gives everyone else so much whiplash that a whole new conflict spiral of the narrative erupts *just* over people not believing the character has changed.

some random redemption arcs that aren’t just ‘zuko, but a little to the left’

I’m evil but all my evil friends betrayed me and I’ve decided that the best revenge is to ruin their evil plans. Yes, this means I’m a “good guy” or whatever. No, I don’t like it any more than you do.

I was evil but all my evil friends betrayed me and now I’m going to latch onto the first person who shows me kindness. If that happens to be the protagonist, I am totally fine with realigning my morality to match theirs.

I never wanted to do what I did, and now the biggest obstacle to me switching sides is convincing me that I’m not a living weapon.

Well as long as you’re imprisoning me in this magic amulet I might as well give you pointers on your technique. I mean come on if you all die I might be stuck here for millennia! It’s not because I like you and don’t want you to die. Nuh uh.

Look, I legit thought that being evil was going to be my best option to get this important thing done, but, uh, that didn’t pan out. Help?

[femboycatofmystery]

[femboycatofmystery]

Hired a moving company and they sent four strong, strapping, beautiful lads to my house to disassemble my furniture and move all my things. I loved them. I got them pizza. They told me moving company gossip. I missed them one minute after they left. My moving lads. Come back to me. You're so strong and so well trained in safe lifting

[femboycatofmystery]

Activism is not cold-calling.

Activism is not cold-calling, and this is critically important to understand.

I'm seeing a lot of posts on here about 'building bridges' and 'finding community,' and then (extremely valid) response posts saying "BUT HOW??" And I'm going to explain something that can be very counter-intuitive: there is strategy involved in community.

As a longtime volunteer labour organizer, I’ve taken and taught many trainings on the strategy of talking. Something that surprises a lot of people is the very first thing you do in a union campaign. You sit down with your organizing committee, take out pen and paper, and literally map it out. You draw a physical map of the workplace: where are the entrances, exits, break rooms, supervisor offices. Essentially, ‘where is it safe to have a union conversation.’ Then you draw another physical chart of your coworkers. You sort out who is union-friendly, openly hostile to unions, or somewhere in the middle, and then you plan out very deliberately and carefully who talks to whom and in what order.

Consider: If Vocally Leftist Jane walks up to Conservative David and says "hey what do you think about unions," David is going to shut down immediately. He's not inclined to listen to Jane. But if Jane talks to Moderate Jason and brings him into the fold, then Jason is a far more effective strategic choice to talk to David, and David may actually hear him out without an instant reaction.

IMPORTANT CAVEAT: If Conservative David turns out to be Alt-Right David, and could be dangerous to follow organizers, we write him off. We are not trying to reach Alt-Right David. We are trying to reach Conservative David, who may actually be persuaded to find solidarity with other employees as fellow workers. Jason is a safe scout to find out which one he is. It does no one any good if Leftist Jane (or even Moderate Jane who is a visible minority) talks to Alt-Right David and puts herself on his radar. Not only has she done nothing to convince Alt-Right David to join a union - she's probably actively turned him against the idea - but now she's also in danger and the entire campaign is at risk. NOBODY WANTS THIS. Jane was NOT a hero for doing this. The organizing committee was foolish and enacted a terrible strategy to everyone's detriment.

Where you can make a difference is with people who will listen to you. You having a conversation with your well-meaning but clueless Centrist Democrat Auntie, and maybe gently helping her understand some things the media has been glossing over, is way more strategically useful than you marching up to MAGA Neighbour You've Met Once and trying to "build community" or "understand" them. They don't care. They're impervious, dangerous, and cruel. But maybe your beloved auntie will think about what you said, and then talk to her friend Anna who IDs as "fiscally conservative" but didn't vote because she can't bring herself to get on board with Trump. Then perhaps Anna talks to her brother Nic who has MAGA leanings but isn't all the way there yet. Proto-MAGA Nic would not have listened to you, nor would he have listened to Centrist Democrat Auntie, but he might absorb some of what his sister is saying.

This is not a cop-out or an echo chamber. This is you spending your time and energy strategically and safely. You are not a useful activist to anyone if you’re dead. Anyone who is telling you to hurl yourself directly at MAGA assholes like cannon fodder has no understanding of the strategy behind community building, and you should feel comfortable writing them off.

Last point: If you are tired, emotionally devastated, and/or in danger: take a break. This post is for people who would feel better jumping into action, not for people who are too overwhelmed to even think about it right now. You are worth so much even if you’re not actively Doing Activism, and your rest is worth more than “a break period so you can recharge and Do More Activism.” We all deserve the individual dignity of being worthy of comfort, rest & safety just on the basis of being human, outside of whatever we're doing for others' benefit. To deny ourselves that dignity is to devalue ourselves, and that’s the absolute last thing any of us should be doing right now.

[femboycatofmystery]

One thing I want everyone to understand is that networks of care are profoundly important, and you don't have to be going full Hogan's Heroes 24/7 to contribute to them.

I want you to not underestimate the value in providing help to others, or to providing help to the helpers. Like if you are the sort of person who feels like you've barely got your shit together enough to get your best friend a ride now and then, guess what, you actually are already in the bucket brigade, you're just further back than you might feel you need to be.

Be kind, and you are already doing the work.

Be thoughtful, and you are already doing the work.

Be creative, and you are already doing the work.

Be you.

And you are already doing the work.

[femboycatofmystery]

Your body must be rested and fed if you wish to be a pervert.

[femboycatofmystery]

[femboycatofmystery]

Jane Austen really said ‘I respect the “I can fix him” movement but that’s just not me. He’ll fix himself if knows what’s good for him’ and that’s why her works are still calling the shots today.

[femboycatofmystery]

yeah no but seriously all of this is literally true???

Like do you understand how insane it is that the way we made the weird magical world of Nikola tesla into the bound-up layers of certitude that we experience today is that we twisted the magic into tighter and tighter circles in smaller and smaller spaces until we could CONTROL ITS MOST MICROSCOPIC MOVEMENTS and make it like, send each other cat pictures?????

We DID THAT?????

AM radio is like literal magic. There is music all around us that we can't hear, and to hear it you just have to tap a crystal (diode) to the earth and listen to it with another magic rock (magnet) and a tin can. You dont even need electricity to make it work because this music around us is literally all the power you need. Oh and at night when the sun has set, the light of the day gets replaced by MORE music because the signals can travel further at night. This is magic. If you even care.

[femboycatofmystery]

bless you @moringmark, this comic watered my crops and healed my herd