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corpsentry · 4 years ago

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allahrakhii (dot) tumblr (dot) com/post/148596180152/honestly-the-depths-of-ignorance-of-white-people

this is a really good post for those who want to learn more about the harmful portrayal of brown women in the legend of zelda series. theres a bunch of helpful links that direct to articles throughout the post as well. if you scroll through a bit youll find the section that covers why the gerudo outfit is racist.

i would appreciate if you post this and not simply brush it aside! this message isnt intended to be hostile or offensive, but rather it is an opportunity for learning and discussion. thank you.

i find the insinuation that i might brush this aside rather ominous anon! first of all, thank you for sharing this post. as someone vaguely from southeast asia i uncovered another facet of the fuckcluster of internalized racism in my system while reading it and will be thinking about it for a while to come. the post is well-written and thoughtfully phrased, plus op provides links to several other resources that i’ll be checking out in my free time too so i’d recommend anyone passing by here give it a read. i also want to apologize for responding to the earlier ask (now deleted) where op was like ‘how is the gerudo outfit racist’ and i was like ‘fuck all if i know’. i was talking out of my ass and failed to consider alternate perspectives. i retract that statement and replace it with this much longer and much more eloquent one.

now everything from here on is frankly quite unrelated to this ask so to the person who sent it please feel free to stop reading right here right now from high school musical as i want to talk about the previous anon message i received and some general stuff regarding fandom and none of that has anything to do with you (you are lovely and the rest of the world is a shithole).

i don’t know if the original anon who sent the ‘i like your art but the gerudo outfit racist :(’ is gonna see this but let’s take a moment to unpack it. i’m not quite sure what anon was going for with this ask. what did they want from me? did they want me to apologize for drawing and posting it? did they want me to delete the post? did they expect me to say oh thank you so much!!! sorry about the racism xd or did they want me to call up shigeru miyamoto and be like ‘hey dude your shit’s racist’ and then take down the entire nintendo corporation in one fell swoop like i was somehow implicated in either the development process or the game by pure merit of drawing fanart of it(????). this was the shit running through my head when i woke up at 6 am this morning because jetlag and opened tumblr and there was this Person sitting there trying to :( me. what’s up with the :(. why are you :(. what do you want from me.

this is where the second anon above comes in. relative to this ask, if the first anon had so much as dropped one (1) link to one (1) post explaining how the outfit might be racist (and taken out the :(, which is lame) then instead of being like ‘which reaction image should i use for this’ i would’ve been like ‘oh here’s something i didn’t know about the world and here’s how i can learn more’. ‘your art great but this racist u___u’ reads like someone trying to guilt-trip someone for shits and giggles. a B grade on a paper is useless unless your prof tells you where you went wrong and before anyone Calls Me Out i’m going to acknowledge that there is a broader issue with marginalized groups having to bear the burden of ‘explaining themselves’ to privileged people who aren’t willing to go and seek information on their own, but let’s just look at this ask for a moment.

what the fuck is this??? what am i even supposed to do with a statement that not only tells me nothing but also seems to have no clear purpose? i am sitting here drawing video game fanart in a college dorm in pennsylvania and i know like 3 things about western media because i don’t like live-action film. if you want to have a conversation please give me something to work with instead of trying to sound sad in my askbox. i can’t turn your :( into a :) because i have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about because i am not god (yet) (although i am trying to).

but let’s talk bigger. racist stereotypes are a huge fucking problem in everything the ideological west gets its hands on. i promise you i know this because i grew up in singapore where the racism was directed towards everyone including ourselves because sir dickbag raffles stuck a flag in the ground and then ruined everything. i can see how nintendo has replicated those racist stereotypes, especially given that east asian countries generally have a long history of racism towards black and brown people. singapore fucks with it too because we’re majority chinese-singaporean and majority lighter-skinned (relatively speaking). op makes a lot of excellent points. perpetuating stereotypes in popular media serves to reinforce racist ideas and further entrench discriminatory beliefs. it’s a chicken egg chicken egg thing. people are socialized into racist beliefs. they create media with racist depictions. young people consume said media and are socialized into racist beliefs. and so on. egg chicken egg chicken.

so, question: where does fanwork figure into all of this? is that 5k ganlink (is this the ship name lol idk if it’s wrong feel free to take me out with a bazooka) e-rated smutfic the egg or the chicken? who is it socializing? who’s writing it? what kind of audience is it reaching? and, more broadly speaking, what is fandom here for, and what does fandom want to achieve?

here we’re going to take a huge detour into another very popular disco horse (at least on twitter i have fuckall clue what’s going on on tumblr at all times) of the present times: the wmulti level wmarketing (wlw) discussion. it is statistically true that there are far less f/f fics on ao3 than m/m fics and f/m fics. this clearly reflects something about fandom’s habits, but the floor is divided. in fact, the floor is on fucking fire all the time. several arguments have been made over the years, of which 1) media creates less-nuanced female characters which makes them harder to connect to (mass media’s fault) and 2) everyone is a gay fetishizer (the individual’s fault) are, arguably, the most popular.

as a head ass philosophy student i’m going to pick the option no one likes and say that i think it’s a combination of all of these factors. and i’m going to step out further and say that people are so inseparable from our communities and societies that it’s impossible to tell where external influence ends and personal preference begins. what this means, more simply, is i think that both individual arguments are insufficient. media is fucking complicated and so are people so imagine when you put all of this shit together on one webpage and then you light a match. tell me, bethany, can you truly say that you like twinkies because You Like Twinkies or was it that advertisement you saw at the bus stop every day for eight years that finally got to you? are you trying to rebel against society’s fear of fatness? are you depressed? do you just like sweet things, and anyway, can anyone “just like” something?

now let’s transplant this issue of societal/self influence (a fandom friendly version of the nature/nurture argument, if you will) onto fandom. so okay, there aren’t a lot of f/f fics. what do?

some popular options i’ve seen are: 1) make angry posts/tweets about how everyone sleeps on f/f relationships in fandom and we’re all secretly lesbophobic 2) call everyone a gay fetishizer 3) write f/f fic

and so here is the other (other? i don’t remember how many problems i’ve listed lol i’m trying here guys) problem: fandom doesn’t have a single cohesive goal. like people don’t come to fandom and then sign a 5 page contract at the end of which is the company vision. everyone comes here to do their own shit. some people use fandom as a means of escape. some people are trying to spread a message (like the evangelists) or educate the youth. some people fuck around and find out.

concept: if the goal of fandom was social activism, then the argument could be made that We Should Write More f/f fics. that make sense to you? because there’s something we’re all striving towards, we can agree that we have an obligation to our community to do something. but the goal of fandom isn’t social activism, is it? maybe it is for you. but it isn’t for everyone here including the 14 year old kid in chinese orchestra and the 56 year old who just wants to read some good werewolf smut. and because we’re all different people who do different things and fandom is not and cannot be your entire life, we can’t make these prescriptive statements. we can’t tell people what to do. ‘people should write more f/f fics because there are very few right now’ that is a valid statement and observation. now will you write those fics? because you’re the only person whose fandom life you can control. because the point of fandom is we’re away from the rules and regulations of Society. because when people are told they can do what they want they will do what they want and if you tell them to do something else, it’s hard to fault them for not taking kindly to it. i’ve written 5k character studies. it’s work. not everyone wants to do that work. that’s why i do it.

detour end and now we return to the chicken egg problem. in my opinion, the shit we create in fandom isn’t the chicken or the egg. it’s the onsen egg that’s been placed on top of your ramen. it’s a product of several complex societal processes, but now it’s here you and maybe the dude sitting across from you are the only ones, by and large, that it’s going to affect. this onsen egg isn’t for the children of the world (broadcast via disney+). this onsen egg isn’t for the politicians who’ll decide on the policy of your country for the next hundred years. they’re not even going to see it because it’s a fucking onsen egg now and no one has taste anymore these days except for yourself, which is why this onsen egg is just for you. put in clearer terms, i agree with op that people in fandom often replicate societal bias in their work (people are copy machines, bethany), but i don’t think most fanfiction has the power to influence society the way that popular media can (see: marvel movies, i dunno, fucking, like, austin powers?), and to critique it with the same mindset we use to critique tony stark is to say that we earnestly think every 15k smutfic is going to be read by millions of people of all ages from across the world. which is not the case. ao3 has a thing you have to click if you’re not logged in you know where you have to agree that you’re 18 or older o read adult stuff. if you lie about that that’s your own goddamn problem. they asked.

and now, part 2, we come around to several interesting points made in the post. op mentioned that ganon is often portrayed as hypersexual (which is fascinating to me i don’t read e rated fic I See What Zelda Fandom Is Doing) or just fucks a lot in general. since i don’t go here i will take op’s word and roll with it, but i have my own word to add: so ganon fucks- what do we do? do we tell people to stop writing fics where ganon fucks? do we force them? do we tell people to write more gen rated character studies (please join me i sit here alone and i (pensive homo stare))?

we could. but we can’t make them. and we also can’t tell them where their ideas are coming from. i don’t, like, read a lot of smutfic but i sure know that shit exists because half my friends are horny as shit and can we all agree that fandom as a whole is just super fucking horny. like yes if ganon as a whole is portrayed more often in sexual situations than the other characters in the franchise, it’s a good and fair observation that Something’s Up Here. but can we really point to individual authors? the premises mentioned in the post by op are premises i’ve seen for haikyuu fanfiction. multiple times. tens of hundreds of times. what if someone’s just really fucking horny? what if they’re replicating racist ideas taught to them by mass media? can we tell? can THEY tell?

the answer is no because humans are black boxes that can’t be opened up even if we drop into the pacific ocean and instead screech helplessly at walls all our lives. the answer is these are complex issues and i don’t think prescriptive ‘Never Write Sexy Ganon’ statements or pointing fingers at random 30 year old smutfic authors will improve the situation. the answer, or at least my answer, is that we should consume media with a critical eye and be aware of potential biases perpetuated by the authors/creators, but striving towards ideological purity is impossible on principle (i promise you everyone on this planet is problematic in some way or another because this purity thing from christianity is fucking lame and also completely fake) and so we should all give that up. my personal answer is i’ve learned a lot about stereotypes about middle eastern and south asian people and i’ll take all this info with me moving forward, but i honestly and earnestly do not think me drawing link and zelda in dumbass princess jasmine outfits is going to directly correlate with an increase in racism as observed in the island city-state of singapore. i am aware now. that’s a good thing. but just like how the h*rry potter fandom has completely detached itself from its horrible creator and now fucks around in its own space doing its own thing, i think it’s fully possible to engage with flawed media because, surprise surprise, all the media in the world is flawed.

#asks #anon #Anonymous #my stuff

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nutty1005 · 4 years ago

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Xiao Zhan: It’s Your Turn

Translator’s Note: This article comes from VogueMe Magazine 2020 Feb Issue.

Currently, the trend in the entertainment business is to get famous overnight, the statistics dictate everything – a drama, a variety show, a song… all of which could give birth to a super idol, fame, commercial value and opportunities that come along with it. In 2019, the drama “The Untamed”, adapted from an internet novel, became this window of opportunity. This is the story of a young man who received the opportunity. And like other idols created by their era, his fanbase grew immensely, radiating throughout the youth, his name etched in time. All of these simply points to this – it’s now Xiao Zhan’s turn.

The summer of 2015, Xiao Zhan had not yet realized that he was going to job switch from the design firm opened by his teacher. The teacher did not feel so as well – as Xiao Zhan left for the talent search variety show, he told him, “Go play, come back to work once you’ve been eliminated.”

The show was called “X-FIRE”, and positions itself as a large scaled youth talent development inspirational show. During broadcast, the description says “16 secretly trained youths painstakingly selected from a few thousand 16-24 year olds”. At that time, Xiao Zhan was 23 years old – nearing the upper age limit.

Xiao Zhan just wanted to “play around a bit”. He felt that he would be just touring for a round, and he would be back after a week. As the former class Cultural Committee Member in his university, Xiao Zhan loved singing, won quite a few inter-school cultural activities awards, but never trained in dance-singing. Xiao Zhan, who graduated in graphic design, learnt drawing since young, but never thought of becoming an artist, because “it is hard to survive as an artist, you still need to earn a living”. He was willing to lead a simple life and go to work everyday, with a direct and clear life plan – as a graphic designer, do his work well, then open his own firm.

The summer 4 years later, the name “Xiao Zhan” meant a lot of different things – a member of a pop group, the lead actor of one of the most popular drama, the owner of a Weibo account with more than 22million followers, or as what Chinese entertainment business puts it – a “top traffic”. The topics and imagery surrounding him includes – Xiao Zhan’s looks, Xiao Zhan’s design talent, Xiao Zhan’s professionalism, Xiao Zhan’s role as Wei Wuxian…

And like the other idols who broke out in this era, he has his own set of records – moderators of Bilibili (a video hosting site in China) nagged that his drama fans uploaded so much of his videos that they “almost see him 800 times a day”, Xiao Zhan was jokingly proclaimed as “The Man who caused the Bloodbath of Bilibili”; he became the cover person of a magazine, and the two mobile sales platform app broke down consecutively on the day of the sales; his popularity in 2020 only got higher – on 9 Jan, according to Tian Mao statistics (TN: Taobao eShopping Mall), the Portrait magazine, where he was the cover person, sold out 100,000 copies in 3 seconds, overall sales exceeding 13million Chinese yuan, a poster was spread all around the internet with the accompanying text “a fandom that brought paper media back from its grave” – this is the Xiao Zhan statistics.

But different from the breakout idols, Xiao Zhan did not encounter major controversies (TN: This was published early Feb), and his career did not seem to go through much fluctuations. He never thought that he would be at this point – “Sometimes you’re not ready, but life has already pushed you to ahead. What you can do is to quickly keep up with the pace.” He is now at the stage where any of his actions are “studied under a magnifying glass”, but he feels that his stress levels are not as high as his previous few years, “the past few years, I had the drive but nowhere to use that, now I know how to work hard.”

During the initial auditions, Xiao Zhan still continued to work as per normal, go onstage – sing – leave, which was quite fun. After the selection down to 32 persons, he did not think much of it, and left his work to go to Beijing to practice the dance for the variety show. After the selection down to 16 persons, he practiced everything – dancing, vocals and flexibility training.

He did not think much of what would happen later. The winter in Beijing was especially cold, after the show recording, it would be around 3am or 4am, and there would be fans waiting for him outside of the studio – Xiao Zhan felt quite sorry for them, “All are young girls, it’s so cold and so dark.” He felt surreal having fans. When the 16 of them went to Zhejiang TV “Running 2016” New Year Eve performance, he saw the stage and felt that it was especially big and he was especially happy, and kept making sure he remembered the moves so as not to make any mistakes. After the final battle, Xiao Zhan’s team lost, but he and a few of his teammates were rescued by fan votes.

In 2016, Xiao Zhan debuted as part of X-Nine. During the signing of the contract, Xiao Zhan finally realized that he was going to make a career switch. “When you look at it now, 23 year old is also still a child, but no one took me as a child then.” – Xiao Zhan was the oldest in the group, he made his own decision to sign the contract, he thought that if it did not work out, he could go back to work, there was no need for him to paint himself into a corner.

3½ years after his debut, Artist Xiao Zhan still had to explain to interviewers his obsession with going to work. That day, he had a pimple on the left side of his face, and the makeup artist was applying essences on his face. The makeup room was simply a curtained area in the basement of the Art Gallery, full of passing staff, the editor was discussing the shooting schedule with his manager, the stylist was here delivering clothes, and he sat there with his eyes closed, allowing others to apply whatever it is on his face.

Xiao Zhan’s eyes are long, and also wide, he is very fair and his side profile is graceful and beautiful. With his looks, one would imagine that his personality would be cooler, more introvert, with mild melancholy, like those prince-like male leads in romantic dramas. But his personality does not really match his looks – he is serious, disciplined, he does not talk much initially, but overall he is a relaxed person, and quite funny occasionally.

“A lot of art students do not want to go to work,” the interviewer said. Xiao Zhan learnt drawing since young, some of his happiest moments in his childhood would be to win drawing awards or to have his works praised by his teachers, other unimportant happy moments includes had a good lunch, went to an amusement park, or had a liking for a girl in high school.

“They never went through the society school of hard knocks,” Xiao Zhan said. He described himself as someone who went through “quite a fair bit of knocking”. Since young, his father thought him to be independent, taught him budgeting, and told him stories about Bill Gates’s children… “I wanted to say, god, you’re not Bill Gates.” Despite all these, Xiao Zhan stopped using his parents’ money ever since his university graduation.

Xiao Zhan not only learnt drawing, he also learnt violin, go and Chinese calligraphy… pushed him to study in “National Key” middle school, “National Key” high school (TN: National Key refers to the top range of schools in China). He was an obedient child, but as a standard art student, Xiao Zhan was better in humanity subjects, and his math was not good, hence all the while he had always been the mid-bottom of the pack, which worried his family of 3 quite a fair bit.

Studying graphic design in university, Xiao Zhan felt that his university life was quite comfortable – everyday before class he would adjust himself a bit, although in the end it seemed like it did not work well after all, but at least his results were decent. Xiao Zhan emphasized that he was “definitely not the school hottie”. He was a good student. After he had learnt what the teachers taught, he started a studio on the side. The design studio would take on poster and logo design work; the photography studio only have 3 persons, Xiao Zhan did the photo taking, the other 2 did lighting. Before graduation he went to intern in a design firm, hence it was easy for him to find a job. Within a year of working, his monthly salary was around 4,000 to 5,000 Chinese Yuan, which would quite alright for Chongqing at that point in time.

Being part of a boy group releasing albums, shooting web dramas. The way to do things right was quite different from his previous job – his characterization in the group is a warm guy, although Xiao Zhan did not like characterization, he seriously fulfilled his role, and he was obedient. When someone in the variety show suggested that he lose some weight, he replied “I’m quite thin already I still have to lose weight”. As a commoner, Xiao Zhan was 183cm and 150lbs, his mother would always say he was too thin, and he felt so himself as well. That person showed him the film, “the camera lens is a really scary thing, I literally looked like a ball”. It was not easy for Xiao Zhan to lose weight, so he did it brutally. He was so hungry that he dreamed that he was eating. Xiao Zhan is now 127lbs, but this was not his thinnest.

“How was it like after debut?” “Unoccupied.” (TN: Xiao Zhan used the Chinese phrase “picking at his feet” to describe the state of emptiness.) Xiao Zhan’s words were paced and gentle, most were caught unawares by the sudden switch to casual humor, he might not be laughing, after others laughed he would continue his conversation seriously.

After his debut, he felt that he was freer than the times when he was still an intern. But he did not allow himself to stay free, he took vocal and dancing lessons, making sure that he could do sing-dancing to the best of his abilities. But he was still a bit lost – when he was still a designer, his future was clear and straight, but after his debut he had no clue where his future led to.

“I could count the number of dramas I’ve acted in with my fingers,” Xiao Zhan said. After which, he started counting them – “Battle through the Heavens”, “The Wolf”, “Oh! My Emperor”, “The Untamed”, “Joy of Life”, “Jade Dynasty”, “The Oath of Love”… the earliest work “Super Star Academy” was not counted – It was shot with his boy group, he was still fat, and he had no clue what he was doing.

Acting was his own idea. When he started auditioning he had not even attended any performance classes, he saw the director, took a piece of paper that indicated the scene and lines, and just went for it. Xiao Zhan did not feel that it was awkward, it was something he wanted to do, so he would do so without any inhibitions, and grasp every opportunity to do so. Singing was something that he always liked, his first single after debut was a song voted by his fans. With the stage and his fans, with attention, he would always want to do it better. Acting was something totally foreign to him.

The first turning point was “The Wolf”. When auditioning, within 2 hours, Xiao Zhan had tried many roles – the bounty hunter who was threatening someone, the prince whose brother was about to be executed… Xiao Zhan won the role of the bounty hunter – the 4th character on the character roll, Ji Chong. During the pre-shoot training he was still acting in “Battle through the Heavens”, daytime he would be shooting, nighttime he would be having performance classes. He did not feel it was tough then, as long as he had time to sleep. “Work is something I am willing to do, I will only feel very motivated, tomorrow must be done better than today.” Xiao Zhan liked Wei Wuxian, felt that he was vivid. When acting, during the first month he would be second guessing himself everyday, is the portrayal accurate? Would the audience accept it? Xiao Zhan checked with the director everyday. After a month, he stopped asking, he felt that he was Wei Wuxian. Dramas adapted from web novels are rarely positively received, his hopes for Wei Wuxian was that “I hope people would not dislike the character because of my acting”.

The summer of 2019, the drama aired, and the real turning point arrived.

Billions of fans, frequent trending topics on Weibo, appearing on multiple magazine covers and even causing the sales platform app to crash…

He is one of the few artists in Weibo that sets his account as “only posts in the past 6 months are viewable”, but it did not affect his popularity. His interaction with his fans are witty, the statistics are more than enough to attract attention. Last year on the Chinese Valentine’s Day (TN: 7th of the 7th Lunar month), he posted a photo informing his fans that he had put on weight, his pants folded up, legs in the swimming pool. One of his fans replied, “Fine, good to know that your leg hairs are doing fine.” This reply was boosted to the top with 190,000 likes.

“After watching ‘The Untamed’ and ‘Joy of Life’ and then meeting you, I feel like you are very similar to your performance method, calm. You are like an AI, whatever you do you’re especially precise.” “You’re highly professional.” The interviewer concluded.

At the start of the conversation, Xiao Zhan just finished an exterior photo shoot, we were both seated, leaning forward and warming hands above the radiator. He said, “Artist is just a job, I don’t like artists to place themselves on a pedestal, just like today you are the reporter who is interviewing me, today I am someone being interviewed. Cooperation, is just so that we can complete our jobs, coming in for the photo shoot is my job today, every single staff is also executing this job, it’s just the role is different.” Because he went through the society “school of hard knocks”, he respected and understood the truth behind teamwork.

As someone who once had to face clients, he knew how it felt as someone at the receiving end of endless unreasonable requests, and therefore he did not want to be someone like that. His standards for work is consistent – high efficiency, good results, everyone is happy, no one has to serve another person. Also “once I am done I will knock off, after I knock off no one should come find me, let me be alone.”

“Everyone works to fulfill their needs, they have entertainment after they knock off, they have freedom and privacy. As a public figure, artist, the product is yourself, the works are also yourself. You have to output materials, contribute works, and then gain the opportunity to grow, for higher social status, value and better lifestyle. For some people, besides their career, they also included their dreams,” the interviewer said.

“The understanding is very thorough. You win some, you lose some, after becoming a public figure it meant that there are multiple pairs of eyes staring at you, anything you do would be judged. Whether it is positive or misguided. Truth and falsehoods, isn’t this circle just like this? Whether the rumors or the gossip is true or false, who knows?” Xiao Zhan said.

On 5 Jan 2020, Xiao Zhan was working in a sculpture garden in Shanghai Songjiang, shooting a series of photographs to be the cover of VogueMe. It was cold, the gallery’s doors were open, and the wind blew from the first floor to the basement. Everyone was wearing winter jackets.

In the morning, beside the metal sculpture on the first floor, Xiao Zhan and model Chen Yu faced the camera separately. As the shutters rolled, they did not exchange glances or touch each other. As the photographer requested the model to sit on the ground, Xiao Zhan said his only sentence to her, “Careful your head.” and used his hands to shield her head from the protruding portion of the sculpture.

That day’s Weibo opening advertisement was also Xiao Zhan. As per the photographer’s request, he tilted his head up slightly and gave a cold gaze, or side glancing a faraway place, but also at the same time, he was smiling sweetly on mobile phone screens, promoting a series of instant food products.

In the afternoon, the team went to the exterior, to a concrete sculpture beside the gallery entrance, where he and the model stood in front of, facing the camera. The arm was on the model’s shoulders, and the two of them looked at the camera – he was even thinner than the model. In yet another set, the staff erected a ladder to one of the rooftop grass patches on the gallery buildings. An ice cold rock slab was selected, which the assistant padded using a jacket, and tested the light levels. After which, it was Xiao Zhan’s turn. He was wearing a red jacket with blue shirt, wearing a baseball cap, lying on his side on the rock slab, supporting his head with his arm. In between shoots, the assisted would hand him a long wool top, with deep blue diamond checks, quite thin. The top was flipped over, he slipped his hands into the sleeves to protect the front of his body, his assistant handed over another water bottle that contained warm mineral water to warm his hands. Xiao Zhan basically did not speak, he placed the bottle on his neck to gain some warmth.

An artist’s job, the profession included losing weight, staying hungry, freezing and staying up overnight, wearing winter clothes in summer is the norm, not drinking water prior to any shoots to prevent water bloating on screen… people who do those well may become famous, if they look good or are lucky they may become even more famous. Now Xiao Zhan has an opportunity, and like his previous job, he chose to be down-to-earth and do it well.

In the evening, the green screens were setup in basement 2 of the gallery. 17:44, Xiao Zhan was in position, his manager reminded the stylist to take note of the clothes’ proportion – “The sweater is too long.” Hence, the sweater was folded up. After the camera assistant brought down the Apple machines, the cameraman adjusted his machines, and started shooting the video. Quite a few scenes were done in one take, in the middle there was a break, the manager and the camera crew were discussing camera positions. This was the 10th hour of the shoot, Xiao Zhan sat behind the table, laid his head on a prop gift box and waited quietly – we could not see if he was tired or not.

The shoot ended, and the sky was already dark. Xiao Zhan has not yet knocked off. The media had ended their work, the manager was darting around, arranging for Xiao Zhan to change out and get on his car, to rush to his rehearsal that night – they were already behind schedule. Both teams bid their farewell, Xiao Zhan warm and gentle, still unclear whether he was tired. After less than an hour’s journey, he would need to go onstage to sing, and thereafter, his work would be to complete the costume testing of 20 different sets of clothes.

The Initial Cold

The time set for the shoot was 9am, Xiao Zhan arrived at the rural set at 8.30am. His overnight flight arrived only the day before, meeting Xiao Zhan on the cold morning of a deep southern winter, his spirits looked great, his face having the same kindness as usual. The endless job schedules taught him how to conserve his energy – no casual conversation, not even to his staff; take every opportunity to eat or rest; absolutely no procrastination, ensure efficiency, do his best to accommodate and complete every job. He is a highly disciplined and professional artist.

In this shoot, the warm, gentle smiles have been replaced by cold, sharp glares, the metal and concrete sculptures gave him a few minutes of inner emotions and narrative, his scenes with the model was almost like he was acting in the set of “Last Year at Marienbad”. Xiao Zhan displayed emotions and charm very different from usual self – this is the power of an actor. The darker filters and monochrome imagery restored the caution that the youth of his age would have, it was the concealed feelings of a sunny boy. With such an idol, not only he can warm your hearts, there are still much to expect from him.

#xiao zhan #sean xiao #xiaozhan #肖战

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adulttrio-imagines · 5 years ago

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🌡️☁️🛁 for adult trio please?

I’m just gonna combine these 2 asks since they’re pretty similar!

☁️ - Soft headcanons

Hisoka

It’s no secret there he likes his sweets and has a horrible sweet tooth, he may act all coy and standoffish, but he’ll appreciate any type of dessert you make him, no matter how he acts

He loves games, card games, video games, mind games, he can spend hours trying out a new game and getting completely engrossed in it, he absolutely loves games and loves mastering them; he also enjoys adding his own twist to games to make them more interesting

He likes teaching and explaining things to people, and is a surprisingly good teacher. He is patient and gives decent (although questionable) examples, and is always willing to see his students improve (for his own gain). In another life, under different circumstances, he would have been a very good mentor with eccentric methods

Chrollo

He has a soft spot for children. It’s incredibly, incredibly small, but not nonexistent. He may not necessarily know how to act around them or like them per say, but he is undeniably softer in his actions towards them, ever so slightly in his own way

He appreciates their innate curiosity and desire to explore the world around them, something that gets more and more difficult to find the older he gets, he also likes being informed of their opinions and outlooks on life

If you can’t sleep during the quiet hours of the night, he’ll make you a cup of tea and read whatever he’s on aloud to you, as it’s something that helps him whenever he cannot sleep

Will and can talk about his current focus of interest for hours, he gets all excited and hyper focused with plenty of excited hand movements, before he retreats into his mind to sort out his thoughts and ideas, and for just those precious moments, his eyes shine

He would never admit it but his favorite books to read are simple hero adventure novels, something about its simplicity just comforts him

Illumi

During the earliest hours of dawn, before he’s fully conscious and aware of everything happening around him, he doesn’t shy away from your touches and lets you hold him close

He has a green thumb and can spend hours tending to his greenhouse, he says it’s to discover new combinations and increase his poison resistance, but it also relaxes him and fills up the emptiness in the mansion

He had a role in helping Kalluto develop his hatsu, and was the one who introduced his brother to origami. It originally started as dexterity training, where they would compete to see who could fold the most cranes; it was also one of the non-harmful training methods he could think of

Before Mike, there used to be another dog that guarded the mansion, and it was Illumi’s best friend and only friend during his earliest years as an only child

🌡️ - Sick headcanons

Previous post here

Hisoka

Hisoka gets sick in three stages; the brat phase, the hallucination phase, and the blackout phase

He can get extremely demanding and pushy in the brat phase; he’s not feeling his best, but he’s still functional enough to be taking advantage of the situation and getting you to adhere to his whim and fancy

He likes wrapping himself out like a burrito using his multitude of blankets since he’s not used to feeling cold

If he’s sick enough, he would start hallucinating and seeing things that aren’t there; they’re harmless for the most part but occasionally his past memories would resurface and force him to hide into himself

Finally he blacks out for days at a time, and remains completely delirious until he gets better, not remembering anything that happened the past week

Chrollo

After leaving meteor city, he’s got all his shots like a dog; medical treatment was a privilege not available to him growing up, and is something that he cannot dream to pass off on now

When he does get sick though, he still pretends that everything is find and dandy, and nearly overdoses himself on whatever flu medication he can get his hands on

Will also stuff himself with vitamin C supplements all in an effort to recover faster

He’s a lot more willing to engage in physical contact whenever he’s sick, and may even initiate himself, he likes leaning against people and just falling asleep on them since he’s so exhausted

Most willing of the three to try out new/non-traditional medications, just to see if it’ll work. He’s always curious about everything around him, no matter how ill he gets

Whenever he’s in a feverish state, he’s almost delirious and makes the most rash of decisions, being a total opposite of his current self

Illumi

He has a tried and true method that cures any illness: sleeping

Since he works himself so hard, when he does get sick he blacks out for at least a full weak and barely remembers anything that happens

Somehow still manages to take care of himself, including cleaning himself up, since he is the most self-sufficient out of his siblings

He is very careful at what he consumes, and has a few dishes that he eats only when he’s sick to boost his immunity and speed up the healing process

When he’s awake and can’t sleep, he likes using this rare moment of spare time to catch up on his reading and give into his guilty pleasure of watching trashy horror films

🧨 - Unexpected headcanon

Hisoka

He’s actually a very organized person when it comes for his own things and can be responsible in fulfilling things that benefit him; he remembers deadlines and completes his tasks just fine, it’s usually a matter of whether he can find the motivation to do so

While he doesn’t know what he finds sexually attractive since almost anything can turn him on, he is always entranced by faces and can spend hours staring at them; if he dates you he would more often then not trace the details of your face whenever you’re asleep

He’s a big switch, even when it comes to spooning. He will always insist on being the big spoon, but secretly he enjoys being the little spoon as well

Chrollo

He’s a huge conspiracy theorist and spend hours reading about unexplained situations, while he is mostly skeptical, the idea that world governments play a huge role of fueling such situations isn’t surprising to him

He hides plenty of food and treats in that big jacket of his, coming from meteor city made him well-acquainted with starvation and it’s a feeling he never wants to be reminded of again

As much as Chrollo is a sapiosexual, he is just as likely to be a moronosexual as well. Something about a loud idiot just amuses him to no end and entices him for reasons beyond his understanding

He loves his loud-mouth dummies, their honest, straightforward and direct nature draws out the best in him, and he sees their ability to call him out on his bullshit as a way to improve himself

Illumi

As much as he resembles his mother, he takes after his father more and used to have a good relationship with the man

He actually went through a rebellious teenager phase during his earlier years and became quite a handful for his parents, something they didn’t know how to handle since it was so different from the quiet, obedient son they had before

Puberty combined with external factors from his job made him quite emotionally volatile and his parent’s’ solution to his actions was to send him for more jobs/punishment, which worsen the situation

Of course, it all calmed down after killua was born and he was stripped from his title as heir to the Zoldyck family, in part due to him believing that if he returned to the way things used to be he’ll be able to get his parent’s attention and love again

🛁 - Bathing headcanon

I’ve written for Hisoka and Illumi here, so I’m going to keep theirs short

Hisoka

His favorite thing to do in baths is to see the blood of his victims slide off him and mingle with the clean bath water, it just mesmerizes him

When he does take a shower, he likes it burning hot, enough for him to steam up the whole bathroom and come out lobster red

Chrollo

He’s the type of person who would listen to podcasts in the shower, bonus points if they’re true crime podcasts

He is pretty indifferent towards showers and baths, and does either depending on his mood, sometimes he wants it to be quick and sometimes he just wants to soak in the bath

While he is pretty neutral towards water temperature, he really appreciates a shower head with good pressure and loves blasting himself with it

He can spend a full hour in the shower just by getting lost in his thoughts and just forgetting where he is

Will imagine hypothetical situations and arguments in the shower and think up the best ways to counter them

His hair takes the longest to wash despite its length due to it being naturally oily, the liberal amounts of gel he uses doesn’t help his case either

Growing up, since clean water was so hard to come by, bath time usually also meant washing his clothes, and it’s a habit that he hasn’t necessarily shaken off

Illumi

He brushes his teeth in the shower, it’s just time-efficient

He lets his hair towel dry, and doesn’t like using hair dryers since it makes his scalp itch for days afterwards

#hunter x hunter #hisoka #chrollo #illumi #adult trio #hisoka headcanon #chrollo headcanon #illumi headcanon #which of them pee in the shower #👀👀#vote now on your phones!#asks #anon

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surveys-at-your-service · 4 years ago

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Survey #282

“daddy’s flown across the ocean / leaving just a memory / a snapshot in the family album / daddy, what’d you leave behind for me?”

What is your favorite type of dance? I like modern dances, especially those unusual or creepy with unique music. They’re the dances I look forward to watching in dance competitions. Do you find making scenes in public fun? Oh fuck no. Lemonade or pink lemonade? Pink is Supreme in so many ways. Where do you feel safest? At home, especially if Mom is here. Have you ever been to a gay pride parade? No, but I’d love to. Would you take your dream job if it were out of the country? No. I don’t want to move to Africa. What do you like to do when you're home alone? HAHA okay so I almost exclusively watch Unus Annus when Mom isn’t home because I will almost without a doubt cackle at least once, and… explaining why I’d be laughing would be WILD. UA is a fucking gift & I’mma miss it when it’s gone. What kind of music calms you down? My best bet is nostalgic music that I hold very close, like Ozzy. The soundtracks to SotC and SH2 are also magical when it comes to soothing me. Who did you last go to a park with? Uhhhh… probably not since I took family pictures for someone. Got some nice ones. Have you ever been robbed? Thankfully, no. Are you working, a student, both, or neither? Neither, and at nearly 25, it’s fucking humiliating. I’m thinking of appealing my disability case (you very rarely get it the first time), but of course self-doubt and anxiety just slaps me across the face again and again by asking, “Do you really need it?” That shit is agonizing. Very highly regarded people in my life agree that it’s realistic for me, at least at this moment, while I sort out my mental health. I don’t plan on being on it forever, fuck no. But right now I am, no matter what anyone says, a leech in my home. What's your favorite holiday? Christmas. I prefer Halloween’s “vibe,” of course, but I am much more excited and just thankful at Christmastime, especially now as an aunt with children who *understand* the holiday. Their joy and excitement is enough of a gift to me. It’s always really hard on Mom because she’s convinced she doesn’t do enough (she cries at least once like… every year), but my sisters and I always reassure her. It’s also a nice opportunity to see Dad and my stepmom, also with my sister’s family, and once again we get to see the kids so happy. But enough about them; what I love most about Christmas is I generally am able to put my troubles into perspective and take the time to remember I am, in the big picture, lucky to have what and who I do. And SNOW!!!!! If you can’t tell I’m stoked for Christmas. Do you prefer male or female friends? Both are great, but I’m more relaxed with female friends because of the whole “scared of men” ordeal. What's your favorite dessert? Biiiiihhhhh lemme get my hands on ice cream. Do you ever go on chatroulette or omegle? Noooo, I never did. That shit creeps me out. Besides, I’m shy. What kind of tea do you drink? None. Do you know anyone in a gang? Not to my knowledge… What color is your fridge? White. We decided to use the fridge already in this house versus our old one. Is your phone mostly on vibrate, silent, or ringtone? It’s just about always on vibrate. Do you own black sunglasses? I don’t own any sunglasses. Are you currently looking for a job? Fuck if I know. Not actively, but if something suitable magically popped up, I’d definitely pursue it. Do you watch MTV? No. Do you like to tell people who you like? Historically, I tend to keep my mouth shut about it to people who know that love interest unless explicitly asked, and even then, it depends on if I think they’ll keep their mouth shut. How often do you braid your hair? It’s too short to be braided. I very rarely had it braided beforehand. What color is your microwave? Black. Do you wash your face in the morning when you wake up? If I remember, especially if I’m groggy. Are you interested in the ocean? No more or no less than the average person. What's a big turn on for you? Keeping physical stuff outta this, I’m just such a fuckin sucker for being authentically romantic lmao. Have you ever thought about being a teacher? Heeeeeelllllll no. What's the first thing you do when you turn your computer on? Close out of the stuff that automatically pops up after it starts. Do you drink Gatorade? Ugh, ew, no. Do you hate when people replace 0's with O's? EX: 9:OO AM. Lol no, it’s honestly aesthetically pleasing in some formats. Did you hate riding the bus? Some of my best school memories are the long bus rides home w/ Jason so uh- Do you ever use XOXO in texts, letters etc..? Nah. Has anyone ever told you they liked you to your face? Yeah. Have you ever touched an elephant? No. Reading or writing? Writing. Do you have a childhood nickname? Mom called (and sometimes still does lakjdf;alkwe) me “Twinkie.” She gave sweets-oriented nicknames to all her kids. Have you ever had a Moon Pie? UGH they’re gross. I have this faint memory as a kid of a sweetheart babysitter my sisters and I had always offering us banana moon pies as a snack or dessert, idr. I’ve always hated anything banana-flavored. Has your car ever had troubles? N/A What's your birthstone? Amethyst. Would you join the navy? I want nothing to do with anything remotely related to war. What's your favorite board game? Battleship. Do you like chess? I’ve never played it nor even know the rules. If you’ve ever tried drugs or alcohol, what was your reason for first trying it? I was absolutely parched after a long, sweaty walk and was offered it to “try” by my mom without me knowing it was alcohol… the “WAIT NO STOP” from everyone was so quick lmao. It was just hard lemonade, so nothing super serious. Do you think you could ever have an abortion if you unexpectantly turned up pregnant right this second? I probably would. There is no fucking way I can emotionally handle carrying a baby right now. But I’d feel like absolute shit, even though I’m pro-choice. I just don’t want to picture myself in that situation. Is there a situation where you caved into peer pressure and regretted it? Probably. Although generally, I’m very resilient to peer pressure when it comes to something I really don’t want to do. What is your favorite video game console? Why? PS2, of course. I think the best games came from that era, many ahead of their time. Example, the original Shadow of the Colossus graphics massively pressured the limits of the software, and it still to this day blows me away. Sure, you have some lag in return, but the end result was just magnificent. I seriously, seriously, seriously hope I’m able to play the remake one day. When you lost your virginity, were you sober? I was. As of this minute, what is going through your mind? How I need a change and purpose in life so motherfucking badly. Where’s the last place you went? I was riding around with Mom, doing some errands. Are both of your blood parents still in your life? Yes. When was the last time you went apple picking? Never. Do you have a good relationship with your cousins? We don’t really… have a relationship. We don’t talk, we just kinda “exist” knowing we’re related. What was the last kids movie you saw? I watched some of Hotel Transylvania 3 with my niece and nephew. Do you know anyone who was born in Africa? When I was still in college, there was at least one guy in my class who was. Tutored me in math. Patience of a saint, haha. Have you ever been to an internet cafe? I actually have zero clue what that is. Has the year gone quickly for you so far? I’ve barely discerned 2018-2020, if I’m being honest with you. It’s just a lump of time where I’ve done jack-all. I mean yeah, school fits in there somewhere, but mentally I wasn’t in a wonderful place and haven’t been “happy” for a long time. My mental state has been the same for a few years. How many siblings does your significant other have? N/A Are you one of those people who can drink vodka straight? Oh, I hiiiighly doubt it. I loathe the taste of alcohol. Do you share a middle name with any of your friends? I legitimately have one of the most basic white bitch middle names in America, I know tons. How many pairs of jeans do you own? None. Do you know the name of the pharmacist at your local drug store? One, yes, considering Mom worked there before the cancer and is still in touch with this pharmacist. What flavor is your toothpaste? Mint. Are you sleepy right now? I think I’m permanently sleepy. Do you like crime films and tv shows? Not especially. Are you bitter about anything? Many things. What was the first online account you remember having? Neopets. My older sister helped me set it up when I was somewhere around eight. Do you use emojis? More than I used to. I’m gradually converting from emoticons to emojis, oof. What was the last type of soda you drank? Mountain Dew. Do you remember much from high school? I probably remember too much from high school, if I’m being honest. I remember far too much in far too much detail during the almost four years I dated Jason. Where would you go for the ultimate honeymoon? Probably the Bahamas, mostly for the pink beaches, aha. It would also be an incredible photography opportunity. Do you know anyone who has a strong accent that is hard to understand? My former best friend’s dad was so southern that yes, I could barely understand him whatsoever. If you had to get a tattoo tomorrow, what would you get? If you mean a fresh, new one and not a glow-up on the Mark tribute tat I’ve mentioned five thousand times, a tribute to Teddy featuring his portrait, pawprint, and the Powerwolf lyrics “and we’ll meet where the wild wolves have gone.” I’m going to be picky as a motherfucker about the design itself, though, so realistically it probably wouldn’t be tomorrow since I’d probably commission people to draw in varying styles. Ugh, I need that tattoo gun, my man. What was the last podcast you listened to? Do you listen to it regularly? That would be 4 Peens in a Pod (it’s… not a porn I swear, it’s Fischfuck and the boys lmao). I’m waaaaaaaaaaay behind on it, though. I watch so many different things now that I’m behind on like… everything I watch/listen to. Are you on a first-name basis with your boss? (or last boss if unemployed) I think I was with all of them? What was the last thing you wrote in a Word document? This survey. Because I combine short ones into Big Boys that I usually don’t finish in one go, I save my progress on it. Who do you miss and what do you miss about them? I miss a number of people and would rather not retrospect on them. What were the best and worst costumes you’ve ever worn? *shrug* Do you know anybody who is gay and married? I think so. What did you last take painkillers for? A headache. Are there any hobbies you want to get back into? Ugh. A whole fucking lot. I’ve thought quite a bit recently on how I miss video editing, but I just don’t have the motivation and dedication for that anymore. Have you ever shared a home with a friend? Yes. What’s the craziest or weirdest place you’ve ever slept? Nowhere that strange at all… Probably just like, the floor, but even then with blankets and stuff. What did you have for lunch today and who made it? I haven't had lunch yet. Are you allergic to anything? How did you find out? Pollen is pretty obvious, while serious discoloring and itching let me know I was allergic to silver. Have you ever been on a date with someone you met online? How was it? Yeah, I was visiting her for a couple weeks. It was nice. Who was the last very physically attractive person you saw? In ~real life~, probably some friend on Facebook. Do you know anyone who is deaf? We recently found out actually that my youngest niece is deaf in her left ear due to a massive buildup of fluid in it. I’m so ready to hear about her reaction to hearing normally once it’s taken care of. Has there ever been a person you regret ever being friends with? Probably at some point. “Ever” makes this question difficult. Do you think you have a good understanding on love? Yes. What do you think of your parent(s)? I love them both immensely while acknowledging their flaws. What celebrity do you think should of never become famous? I don’t care enough to think on this honestly haha. Did you ever get into the Twilight saga craze? What about the Harry Potter craze? Neither. What's your opinion about Katy Perry's song "I Kissed a Girl"? It was bold for its time, for sure. I’ve never minded it. Actually since coming out as bi I’ve known that this song has to be included in the recession dances of my wedding if my partner is female lmao. Do you believe in heaven? If so, what's it like? If not, why? I hope there’s some sort of total bliss after death if you’re deserving of such, but I don’t know. I definitely don’t know how I actually picture it. Even if there’s not, well, I’m assuming I just won’t exist anymore, so I wouldn’t be able to care anyway. Sometimes I hope that's the case. What email service do you use for your main (or only) email account? Hotmail. Did you ever believe in the Tooth Fairy? Yeah. I remember there was one time where “she” didn’t trade my tooth for munz and I was so mad lmao. Mom apparently forgot and slipped something under the pillow while I was getting ready for school. How I fell for it, who knows man, kids are wild. How do you feel about Taco Bell? I’m not a Mexican food fan, really, but I do love their cheese (with or without chicken) quite a bit. The cinnamon bite things are bomb as FUCK, too. I’m still mad tilted they took potato products off their menu tho because I used to destroy the fiesta potatoes. How often do you go on to YouTube? I’m like… always on it. Not focusing on it at all times, but something’s in the background. Back when Spongebob Squarepants was famous, were you interested in it? Well of course, man. What's your dream pet? Ugggghhhh a sunset morph ball python, probably. Buuut I’ve seen some over $2k with their rarity. More realistically, I really, really want a Brazilian Black tarantula. And an arctic morph hognose. I want a lot of pets. ;_; Who's been your favorite teacher growing up, and why? God, I have a lot, honestly. All things considered, the answer is probably Miss Tobey, who was my physical science teacher in high school. She’s an extremely close family friend now involved regularly in my family’s lives. She can be… difficult and says shit before thinking, but we love her nevertheless. What's your favorite fairy tale? Fuck outta here if you say Shrek isn’t one. Do you have a favorite pen? Uh, no… I barely ever use pens anyway. Has a child ever asked you a question you found difficult to answer? Yeah; it happens sometimes with my niece and nephew. Name five books you've read in the past year. I think I’ve read the first three Wings of Fire book within the same year, and I’m currently on the forth. Other than those, I started The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, but only got through the prologue I think before my focus shifted onto WoF. I still plan on reading it at some point, though. ^Are any of those books your favorite? No. The prequel to The Testaments, The Handmaid’s Tale, is very high up there, though. Are you a person that enjoys re-reading books? Not at all. Once I read it once, I’m done. There are VERY few books I’ve reread, and most of those were children’s books from when I was little. Do you have a favorite talk show host? Don’t watch any. Which sounds the most refreshing: a hot shower or a cold one? I prefer hot showers unless I seeeeeriously need to cool down. Have you ever made your own soap? No. Can you sleep with socks on? UGH NO. When was the last time you were pissed beyond belief and why? Ummm good question. I don’t know about *that* mad. Maybe when Ashley’s mother-in-law shared a massively homophobic article that condoned conversion therapy on Facebook that resulted in me removing her from my friends and RAGING to my mom about it. That was forever ago, though. Do you have a favorite candle brand? No. What is your opinion on taxidermy? I have… very mixed feelings. If the animal was hunted for sport, then it’s fuckin disgusting; you literally killed an animal with the intention to show off the fact you’re a goddamn murderer. On the other hand, taxidermy of naturally-deceased animals can be educational, and even… artistic sometimes? I don’t know. I can’t really pick one stance over the other. Would you ever want to own a body part in a jar? Actually, yes, particularly of fetal animals (that WERE NOT killed for the sake of displaying), but for the same reasons above, I’m not sure if I would *really* do it. They are incredibly interesting to me, more so than taxidermy probably, but yeah, I still question the morality of it. What is the worst thing you have ever done to your own hair? I don’t think I’ve ever really done a “bad” thing to my hair. What qualities of yours do you think could potentially harm a relationship? I’m very clingy and, in the beginning, very paranoid that you’re going to leave. Have any of your childhood habits carried over into adolescence/adulthood? I had AWFUL separation anxiety from my mom for a very long time as a kid, and I guess that evolved into my extreme inability to handle loss well, maybe. I’d say they’re at least somewhat related. What is the first band that comes to mind when I say 'dark'? Cradle of Filth popped up first. As far as relationships go, what are your biggest deal-breakers? Abuse, arrogance, and distrust probably top the list. Be honest: do looks really matter to you? Nah. It’s nice to be physically attracted to my partner, but it’s not a must. Have you ever done something simply because you were of age? No. Do you think it's worth it to tell someone you had feelings for them when you don't have them anymore? I mean, what’s the situation? Are you hanging out, talking about relationships casually? I’d say it’s fine then if it’s relevant to the conversation. I don’t think it’s worth going out of your way to tell someone you liked them if you don’t anymore, though. Have you ever done something you once thought you'd be too chicken to do? Y’know that ride at fairs where you go up really high on a circular thing with other people and then drop abruptly? That. I screamed like a mf lmao. I had to put a lot of effort into not yelling “SHIIIIIIIIIIIT” lmao. What's a food you love but don't get to eat very often? Stuff involving shrimp, ig. What's your favorite mythical being? Dragons! Have you ever felt a baby kick? I don’t think so, and I don’t want to, considering it’s fucking terrifying to me. I can’t even see a baby move without screaming and wanting to hurl. When is the last time you did something truly fun, and what was it? Who the fuck knows… What is the worst thing you've ever done when you were really angry? Said things I shouldn’t have. Are there any pills you take on a daily basis? If so, what? A lot. I can’t be bothered to go through all of them. At what age do you first remember feeling butterflies in your stomach around someone? I’m not sure. Do you feel that way around anyone now? I don’t think so. What is your main heritage? German or Irish, idr which is more prominent. What is a song that you hate to admit you like? “Bitches” by Hollywood Undead came to me first lmao. What inspires you to get off your bum and do something productive? More than anything, watching inspirational YouTube videos. What part of your body have you had the most problems with in your life? I suppose maybe my ears? I had tubes put in as a kid, I had an absolutely agonizing ear infection once, I had earwax adhered to my eardrum, and they've always been STUPID dry and flaky. Are you watching your weight? Like a hawk, but it doesn’t seem to matter anyway. :^) Have you ever become really good friends with someone you found online? Most of my closest friends I’ve met online. What is the coolest tattoo you've ever seen? You’re asking the wroooong person, lol. I’ve just seen way too many… Have you ever created anything artistic that you're proud of? If so, what? Lots of things; drawings, some writing, photographs, video edits… What do you like on your hotdogs, if you eat hotdogs? Just ketchup and mustard. What is a subject that makes you uncomfortable? Sex. What is a subject you can talk on and on about and not get sick of it? MEERKATS and MARK What is the worst thing someone could do to you emotionally? Tell me I’m weak. Or that my mental illnesses truly do make me unlovable. Just essentially do fucking not make me feel what Jason did. What is the worst thing you've ever done to someone emotionally? Said some extremely mean and potentially scarring shit.

#survey #quiz #questions #questionnaire

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rubberduckyrye · 5 years ago

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Sorry that it took me a while to get to these; I’ve been very low energy and am still low energy so apologies for that!

As for Marie, her real name is Olivia (her stage name is Marie Annette) and yes, it’s a pun, because she is the Ultimate Marionettist. You can ask more about her @aroseandapen since she is L’s muse.

However, Marie’s plot wasn’t created so she could run away from the consequences of her actions--in actuality, they’re much more sinister. You see, the basic idea we have right now is that a certain someone knew about the chapter 3 blackened before they murdered the second victim, but was being blackmailed into silence--because they had a secret they would rather die for than let get loose. However, this lead to Marie’s friend/lover/family/whatever idk we haven’t decided that part yet, get killed as the second victim. After learning about that person’s involvement, Marie gets furious and blames them, but everyone pretty much forgives them once they understand. All but Jaden, who while he does understand their motives, also understands that Marie is still hurt by them and it did cause the death of someone else, and at least had mixed feelings about it and made the mistake of expressing this to Marie.

That was a huge mistake, because Marie then decided that everyone but Jaden should live, and then she was presented with the opportunity to force Jaden into a blackened role. She then makes sure he couldn’t communicate the fact that he was he blackened (as he tried to leave evidence in the form of his glasses at the crime scene, but Marie figured him out quickly and ordered him not to be sneaky about it and not let anyone know) and yeah. Marie basically made Jaden into a blackened not to escape from punishment, but to punish everyone (including herself) and let Jaden go free.

This, of course, backfires, but that’s probably why Marie had Jaden kill that specific classmate. Because at least that person would be dead if her plan failed.

The worst part is that Marie is a pretty good person before this, too, which makes the betrayal so much more impactful.

I can give you a little backstory on Adrian, Jaden, and Irene if you like! I have those written out, so;

Adrian Blanc, the Ultimate Dilettante;

Adrian’s life was pretty mundane and average. They grew up in the middle class, had a normal life with their normal family and normal friends. There was nothing extra ordinary about them, nothing to report. The only thing that caught anyone’s attention, in fact, was how intelligent and sharp Adrian was.

Adrian has the Ultimate Analysis ability, and with their ADHD, tend to hyperfixate on different subjects of all kinds (I.E. Art, music, writing, math, science, mechanics, you name it) but before they could master any skill, Adrian would always give up, claiming that they had grown too bored of the trade to continue. Adrian became known in their little town as “the renaissance child” or “the jack of all trades,” and would often take on small jobs and favors from neighbors to complete a mundane task. However, they were never talented enough to get a stable job from professionals of the craft, being told that their mediocre skills weren’t enough to qualify for anything.

One day, Adrian’s popularity in their hometown got out to the bigger name cities, and they were asked to star on a talk show and display their many mediocre talents.

Impressed by their wide array of skills, the American Ultimate Initiative contacted Adrian to ask them if they wanted to attend the American Hope’s Peak Academy as “The Ultimate Dilettante.” Hesitantly, Adrian agreed, though is uncomfortable with their title.

Adrian is insecure over their lack of mastering any single talent, and feels as if their “Ultimate Title” can feel like someone was mocking them for it. After all, in the modern professional world, a “Jack of all trades” was pretty useless.

Jaden Holland, the Ultimate Digital Artist;

The Holland family is a black, progressive family that consists of Jaden’s mother (Agatha), Jaden’s elder sister (Jayleen), Jaden’s elder brother (Glenn) and Jaden himself, and a small dog named Juniper. (You can ask L more about Jayleen and Glenn)

Jaden’s father left their family when Jaden was just born, so his mother and his elder sister were the ones who mostly raised Glenn and Jaden. With Agatha working in the police force and their overall family ideals being liberal, Jaden grew up more socially aware and expressive early on. However, when he was a young child, Jaden was attacked by a large mixed breed stray dog, which left grotesque scars on his neck and unable to use his vocal chords. Ever since, he has been wearing high-collared shirts and turtle necks to hide them, embarrassed and ashamed of the scars. He also found that whispering could be painful at times, so he and his family learned sign language.

Aside from that traumatic event, Jaden lived a relatively calm life, and he took interest in digital art soon after the attack. He begged his mother for a pen tablet, and kick started his talent in the digital arts. Jaden has posted over one-thousand pieces of art under the user “Silenced-Arts.” He became quite a popular artist over time, and soon, he was written about in newspapers and online articles as “the boy who can paint a photo,” which was a reference to Jaden’s typical art style being hyper-realistic paintings of surreal scenes that people often would often mistake as photos or edited photos. This caused a bit of controversy until Jaden learned how to use Hypercam and other screen-recording software, and posted various drawing videos that immediately made him an even more popular artist on youtube and all over the web.

Jaden expanded his skills to different forms of digital art, such as 3D modeling and 2D/3D animation. However, he is most comfortable and skilled with painting and drawing.

His skills and talent grew until finally, just before his second year of high school, Jaden was scouted by the American Hopes Peak Academy as the Ultimate Digital Artist for a student film that was all animated but was 100% painted and hyper realistic.

Jaden has a special pair of gloves made by “A friend of a friend” (hint: It Miu) that has special sensors that can translate his signing to American English, and has a speaker that projects a voice resting in his breast pocket. This idea is loosely based off of this amazing keyboard “glove” where each unique hand gesture represents a unique letter. It relies on the same principle, except using ASL gestures and a blue tooth “text to speech” speaker. The speaker sounds as fluid and human as K1-B0’s voice, and the gloves have sensors to change the “tone” of his voice and mimic the emotion he wants to convey. (Jaden has the bonus of being able to manually select an emotion with gestures that are unique but do not mean anything in ASL, such as double tapping your thumb and index finger together... well unless that is a thing in sign language, I’m not sure.)

Jaden’s older brother, Glenn, is a member of D.I.C.E. as a fire dancer.

Irene Foster, the Ultimate Street Fighter;

Irene was a runaway orphan, originally born into a wealthy family. Her parents were always busy with work, so Irene was typically left to her own devices or kept busy with random lessons that varied from piano lessons to fencing. However, her parents were assassinated due to her father’s business company making enemies in the wrong places. The assassin didn’t kill Irene, only because of the guilt that he pretty much just made this girl into an orphan. (He wasn’t very good at being an assassin.)

Irene then ran away from Britain to New York City by stowing away on an airplane, and ran away from foster homes that took her in until she started getting into fights. Eventually, underground criminal rings for street fighting took an interest in her, and this earned her access to an underground street fighting ring. She was a natural fighter (though often feeling like she was fighting for her very life) and quickly earned a living off of her matches.

Eventually, she came across a house just outside of the city that had caught on fire. Among the flames was a little girl named Erin Rider, holding a teddy bear in one hand and a lighter in the other. After a little prying, Irene learned that Erin was a victim of constant abuse from her parents, and she thought she could burn the house down and run away. Erin is unaware that she killed her parents in the house fire and assumes they thought she died and never looked for her. Irene never had the heart to tell Erin that she killed her own parents, and instead, decided to take care of the little girl as her own sister. She decided it would be a secret she took with her to her grave.

With another mouth to feed, however, Irene had to take on more challenges to earn money enough for both her and Erin to eat, and eventually, Irene became known in the underground ring as “The Girl of Iron.” This caught the attention of the American Ultimate Initiative, and Irene earned her title as the “Ultimate Street Fighter.”

Now just for you, I’ll go ahead and type out Leah’s back story to the best of my ability because why not:

Leah Welsh, the Ultimate Hunter/Huntress;

Leah was disowned by her parents at the age of 13, once she finally confessed to them that their son, Orlando, didn’t exist anymore and wanted to be a girl named Leah. The transphobic backlash from her parents came as a genuine, horrifying shock to Leah, and she immediately ran away to her grandfather Orrin’s house to explain what happened. Being a far more open minded man and far more liberal, he disowned his own child and took Leah in as his own, and decided to move from Ireland to the United States to further distance them from the horrible people that were Leah’s parents.

Orrin was a skilled hunter, and not being able to leave a young Leah by herself, he decided to take her with him. Leah took an interest in hunting, and Orrin started teaching her--and much to his surprise, Leah took the lessons extremely well, and within just a few years, was a master hunter that surpassed even his own skills. They even traveled to Australia and Africa for some legal hunting.

However, Orrin was old, and he eventually passed away from old age when Leah was sixteen. Saddened but not discouraged, Leah started hunting game to make a profit as a survival tactic.

Eventually, Leah was called by a secret service of the government and taken into custody to be given an offer. A huge sum of money for using her hunting skills for an assassination--a very corrupt man who dealt with human trafficking, terrorism, and other criminal activities that made him too dangerous. However, every previous assassination attempt lead to failure due to the men and woman being official government figures and there being a rat in the government. They needed someone who could pull off the assassination who was unsuspecting and didn’t have a face int he underground criminal ring. Leah hesitantly accepted the offer.

She was sent to Australia for her target, since he was on a vacation there with his family. It was a very simple job, in actuality, and she used a sniper rifle in the wilderness to kill her target when he was having a picnic break with his family after stalking him for several nights. Unfortunately, Leah may have mentally prepared for his death and telling herself he deserved it for being such a monster, but she didn’t mentally prepare herself for the family’s reaction to his assassination. Leah went home that very same night with the screams still ringing in her ears.

A few months later, Leah learned that the wife of the corrupted man had killed her two children and then herself. As much as Leah tried, she couldn’t get the incident out of her head, and she decided to hunt some deer to distract herself from it, only to shoot a deer and it’s cry immediately triggering her. Immediately after the incident with the deer, Leah realized all at once that she was ending lives, killing creatures with families and futures that she stole away, and in her grief and trauma, Leah became completely vegan and vouched to never hunt again, nor kill any living, breathing creature.

A month later, Leah received an invitation from the American Hope’s Peak to be “The Ultimate Hunter”. With no job or any way to make money, Leah had no choice but to accept, but the title was more like a huge slap in the face than an honor to have.

#The 49th Killing Game #Leah Welsh #Jaden Holland #Adrian Blanc #Irene Foster

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goldenhour-goldenboy · 6 years ago

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@detectivegordons So I saw you were looking for new youtube channels to check out and boy, do I have some gems for you. I started writing this as a normal ask but it quickly got waaay too long so we’re doing a classic text post + add where I can comfortably link the channels and also the rest of my peeps can check them out if they’re interested. So. Let’s divide and conquer:

Cooking

Bon Appétit (Test Kitchen) - One kitchen. Various series with their own themes and style by a specific cook. We have Claire who does ‘Pastry Chef attempts to do x/y/z’ of snacks and treats (e.g. ‘Pastry Chef attempts to make Gourmet Twizzlers’, ‘Pastry Chef attempts to make Ferrero Rocher’) and it’s a delight to watch her struggle through the process of replicating it as closely as possible. There’s also Brad doing ‘It’s alive’ featuring everything involving Fermentation, basically. The editing on this one is the best. There’s Carla inviting celebrities and doing follow alongs and back to back cooking. Ugh, and so many more, I love them all!

House Renovations

Wabi Sab-E - Follow this couple on their journey to renovate and old barn doing everything by themselves - construction, pluming, painting, tiling. It never gets boring due to the faster pace of the video and the really thought out and lovely edit. They’re a cute, genuine couple with two dogs and a cat as far as I can recall and just in general awesome folks.

Madeleine Olivia - Apparently she does lifestyle as well but I only watch her renovating videos. She and her boyfriend (fiance/husband??) bought a very cute cottage and just started remodeling the whole thing. She’s not as knowledgable or skilled as the other channels but watching her talk throughs and bringing bits and pieces together really calms me down.

Three Birds Renovation - Now, this is a professional channel. The three birds are three ladies from Australia renovating whole properties and really glamming up the lots. This isn’t diy it’s full on money and glam but if you want to watch houses getting remodeled and basically almost built from scratch again, this is your channel. They usually take on a house and then upload each room as a separate video. My favorite (as I guess most people’s fav is) is their forever home series where they each do their own houses and really kick it out of the park. Extravaganza.

Lifestyle

Liziqi - A fairy queen from another realm. Absolute beauty shots of her doing her daily life, ranging from picking wild mushrooms, building a love seat from scratch with bamboo, making her own tools, cooking in a self made stone stove. No dialogue, mainly just music and her occasionally trying to keep the sheep from eating her cabbage. You NEED to watch at least one of her vids, I cannot describe this to you!

Claire Marshall - Claire makes beautifully edited lifestyle vlogs featuring fashion, travel, reconnecting with her past, her cat, make up, drafting/doodling or just life and her thoughts on it in general. She has a much more calmer vibe which I personally prefer to a louder and up beat video personality and her flow, aesthetic and visual presentation really drew me in.

Grackle - A cute little every day vlogger from England. Nothing fancy, nothing out of the box, just plain good and old vlogging and following her around. She’s an absolute dork, a gentle soul and I find her family very funny and relating, lol.

Damon & Jo - They used to do a lot of travel vlogs and I mainly followed them because of their older videos, now they’re both kinda doing their own thing but they’re still great, still traveling the world on a low budget. They’re very very talented when it comes to languages and I find them going on adventures in foreign countries highly amusing.

Eve Cornwell - Eve is a soon to be proper lawyer currently finishing her masters degree (I think?? I need to catch up on her, lol). She drinks too much coffee, is a relatable student who struggles through her workload and shows you what it takes to get that law degree. Also her editing is just *chef kisses* super cute.

Booktube

Paperbackdreams - I just saw a few of her vids bc I’m mainly not that much into booktube but her video about after just had me snorting all the way through so maybe you enjoy that. Also, a very small curly haired bean.

LilyCReads - Lily got famous for her rant videos and I just love how she picks apart shitty plots. Mainly, because she swears a lot. But she also has a series of her reading the Harry Potter books for the first time and I quite enjoyed them. Simple, very entertaining.

Readwithcindy - Only watched a few of her videos but I love her style and her vibe a lot. Also, she has the same favorite books as I do so ... maybe that’s a reason as well. Oh, yeah. And we share the depression part and I can relate on t h a t.

Movie Commentary

Dylan is in Trouble - Basically a dude watching our favorite chick flicks, guilty pleasure or teenage obsession shows and comments on them. That’s it. That’s the whole content. He started a series where he was watching the cringiest shows and see how much he could take and it basically evolved from that to .. watching movies and commenting/ranting/questioning various parts that we all questioned.

Alex Meyers - Alex comments on shows and sums up weird stories very well and he does so with the help of animation. Basically, he’s an artist making fun of weird shows but it’s very light hearted and mostly not ill intended. Also, his animations feature his dog so if that doesn’t get you selling idk what does.

Trin Lovell - She’s like Dylan. But female. And asian. And much more energetic but just as funny (if not even more). Also, way more edited and dramatic but I like it. So, yeah, a movie commentary channel watching everything from Twilight to Riverdale, lol.

Art

Emily Artiful - I mainly followed her because of her Sketchbook Storytime videos where she draws and chats/rants to her viewers at the same time and it’s not only beautiful but highly amusing as well. Love her presence and her way of telling a story and getting riled up about it.

Documentary/Personal

Max Joseph - I know, it’s the guy from Catfish but hear me out. He’s got like 2 vids up where he really took the time and effort and met with very interesting peeps. One of the videos is about if you need to be an asshole to make it as a director in the movie industry. The other one is book related, how to read more books and such and I found them highly intriguing and fascinating! He doesn’t have that many videos yet but those two are like an hour long so grab a snack, sit back and enjoy!

Film Analysis/Video Essays

Now, those are channels focusing on movie analysis and explaining shots and film for you and why we, as the audience, feel a certain way because we’ve been set up. So if you’re interest in that (I LOVE those) that might be your niche. They’re mostly doing the same thing so I’m just gonna link their channels down below!

Lessons from the Screenplay

Nerdwriter1

Sideways

Tyler Mowery

Let me know if you knew any of those already or if you liked any of them! :)

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ginnyzero · 5 years ago

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Trivialization of Writing in Today’s Society

Writing is an important skill. Writing is more than the ability to write the alphabet and string the letters into words. Writing is the way we express ideas. It is an important tool in our society from writing business letters, making deals, interviews, pitching projects to writing sermons and stories.

Schools would teach creative writing in the lower classes. But then as students got older, this was phased out in favor of business writing, pitch papers and essays. These pitch papers and essays were touted as important skills that students needed to learn to survive in the university environment and the bigger world. And the ability to tell a story, which is what the basis of these essays and pitch papers were really about, became lost and ‘less important’ in the scheme of things. (The structure of an essay is just as important as a structure of a story.)

Writing, storytelling, the ability to string words together into a cohesive, coherent whole with a beginning, middle and ending isn’t valued. The idea that writing a book is work is actually laughed at. Writing if it isn’t journalism or scientific papers is not considered a viable career. We recommend our children become doctors and lawyers. People who follow protocols and rules, instead of encouraging to be creative and think freely.

For some reason there is a prevailing attitude in our society that anyone can write a novel and be good at it. Media encourages this view. I can think of two shows that I like off the top of my head about how Doctors, a Medical Examiner and a Forensic Anthropologist are both writers. Media has pushed that these two fact loving rational people have the creativity to write novels and write novels well that apparently have emotional appeal that connect to audiences. (I am still trying to figure out after 11 Seasons of Bones when Brennan actually has time to write these novels. And I’m not sure now when Maura has time to write her novel.)

They put forth this message that writing a novel is relatively easy and fame is assured once you’re published. However, I find it hard to believe that both of these very analytical characters are able to connect to an audience. With Brennan they try to explain that Angela is her “human editor” and comes up with the scenes that aren’t fact driven. It really burned me that they showed Clark Edison getting a novel deal while they used excerpts on how horrible writing was for laughs. They also cut out the fact he'd need an agent, not go to the publisher's directly. They made it seem even horrible writers could easily get a book deal. Thankfully, this was never brought up again. (Maura got a critic from her editor that her characters were flat and her setting didn't come alive and I cheered. Yes, constructive criticism that made sense!) Even the procedural Castle, who was about a writer assisting a homicide detective, used a writer who was already successful and just suffering from writer’s block. At least he seems to understand story and has emotional grounding to connect to an audience. But they still avoided that it takes time, effort, talent and learned skill to write a novel. (Castle always wrote off screen.)

There are a lot of people who believe that they can write a novel despite not having done any creative writing since third grade. (I think I may have done some creative writing in ninth grade for class but I went to a private high school.) A lot of people think that they have a novel in them. Without thinking through the entire process or knowing how a novel is structured. And if they’re willing to take the time to learn about structure and put the effort into sitting down and writing. Then more power to them, yay, more people being creative. However, most people do not have the fortitude or the desire to write novel even if they think they can. So those that do take the time and put forth the effort to write a novel, even if it isn’t the greatest novel aren’t taken seriously because “anybody can do that.”

No. It takes skill. It takes knowledge. It takes a certain amount of talent. And it takes practice. You have to learn to do it by doing it over and over again. I started writing in seventh grade and my first story was a horrible piece of shit that had no conflict and no hardship. For a very long time I was so conflict adverse, I could barely put it into my stories. I have chapters and chapters of stories on my laptop that have great characters, great worlds, but are in the end boring because there was no conflict. Dialogue, conflict, action, world building, characters, each of these ideas takes a certain amount of time and ability to do properly. It doesn’t come easily or naturally. It can be tiring and difficult and depressing. One has to learn to do it. Sometimes you get it right. Sometimes you fail. It’s work. (And I find it fun, oh woe is me.)

I’m not a lawyer. I haven't learned the law code. I wouldn’t want to represent myself in court. I’m not a doctor. I don't know more than super basic anatomy. I wouldn’t perform surgery on myself or anyone else. I’m not a plumber. I can’t fix the leaks in my pipes. I haven't learned that skill. And I don’t expect my plumber, lawyer, doctor to be able to write even as I value their services as plumbers, lawyers, and doctors.

A doctor can heal your disease. A writer can take you to a far away place on a journey of your imagination for hours on end and distract you from pain and disease both emotional and physical.

But we aren’t given the credit we deserve. There are places where writers are barely given credit at all; movies, video games. Things that hinge on having a good story. Having a good story to hook your viewers and players into your game is just as important if not more important than having a good visual look and good game play mechanics. But who gets the credit if things go right for a movie? The director and the actors. Who gets credit when things go badly for a movie? The director and the actors. Who gets credit for a game outside of the studio? The guy in charge of the studio or the game director.

Writers aren’t really on the sets during the filming of movies. If a book writer has their property being turned into a film or television show. They don’t get to adapt it themselves. They don’t have a say in what gets changed. They’ve basically sold the rights of their own intellectual property away and have no control on how it is presented to the public. When a screen writer writes a scene that is important to the plot of the movie and the director or the editor decide to cut it for whatever reason, the screen writer doesn’t get the chance to protest that the story will no longer make sense. There are writers who get no credit for working on the script at all. They are called script fixers and it is their job to take a script and make it better.

And you would think that in fandom circles where it thrives on the exchange of free ideas it would be different. At one time, it was considered taboo to make money off of anyone else’s intellectual property. But changing times and trends and a more Japanese view of copyright began to infiltrate fandom as fandom has become more accepted and less secretive. Huge companies are turning blind eyes to copyright infringement as it brings more attention to their brand that they don’t have to pay for. There isn’t as much fear of being sued. It is almost considered normal now in fandom for artists to take fan art commissions to earn a little extra money to get through college.

But fan fiction commissions? Blasphemy. You “don’t do it.” You don’t talk about doing it. Fan creators still get greatly uncomfortable with the idea that someone could pay another person to write them something. Despite the fact it takes time and effort and talent to write as much as it takes time, effort and talent to draw. I am not saying that fan fiction writers should be paid for their work. That's a different kettle of fish. However, like a fan artist who takes commissions, there is a double standard if a fan fiction writer can't do the same. Many fan fiction writers wouldn't dream of trying to make money off writing fan fiction, just as many fan artists wouldn't dream of making money off their fandom art. However, it is an acceptable practice for artists to do so and unacceptable concept for fan fiction writers to even think about it. But, there is also now a dialogue about it in fandom circles and eventually capitalism will determine if it happens or not.

Writing is an important skill and a learned skill. The ability to tell a story in a cohesive, concise and coherent way is important in all types of work. It is too bad that our society doesn’t see it that way.

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dotzines · 5 years ago

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Artist spotlight: Sam Howard!

✿ Instagram ✿

Header source: [X]

Introduce yourself Hello! I am a university student studying geeky drawings and how to make them, sometimes including doodles of games like Night in the Woods, Stardew Valley, and, more recently, Maplestory 2. I love drawing cute beasts and other humanoid-monsters and their individual melodrama with routine. Also I worship chocolate covered raisins and hope that doesn't negate any cool thoughts you might've had about me until this sentence. When did you start drawing? Are you a digital or traditional artist? I started drawing about 3 years ago when I decided I wanted to pursue art as a career (and worked mad hard to build skills to feel "worthy"). I work mostly digitally, but I adore doing traditional work for sketches and conceptualizing. Do you use any traditional mediums? If so, which are your favorites? I'm very simple, I mostly just use graphite and the occasional markers and ink pens. I love cartoony looks, so it works well for me!

Why do you prefer traditional over digital? (or viceversa) I get a lot cleaner colors for digital and overall the crisper look I yearn for. I prefer to sketch things out traditionally sometimes, but digitally allows me to save multiple renditions of sketches for me to compare to very easily within the same file without mess or struggle with color picking/matching! I also adore the ranges of doing more dramatic lighting and comparing which I like better haha. What do you think is the most challenging part about being a traditional/digital artist? With digital art, it is harder to maintain loose sketches or lines. I hate using smoothing in Photoshop because of the inherent (and purposeful) lag that comes with it, but with the tablet I've got it's necessary or else the lines jitter insanely due to the nibs for the tablet not exactly working (especially since this isn't exactly a drawing tablet). On that same note, having your medium being expensive but durable (as opposed to traditional being over time) isn't the most convenient or adaptable. What inspires your pieces? Goofy mishaps in day-to-day life. When I or other friends tell silly, seemingly small stories about their day or my day I feel a melodramatic urge to be romantically artsy with their/my entertaining 5 to 20 seconds!

image source: [X] Explain your "everyday" drawing process My first thoughts are usually "What would be bouncy fun" or "What's something this character would do odd in a normal situation" to at least get the ball rolling. If neither of those work for my goal then I ask what has happened to me or someone else similarly that I can draw from, and then I make 3 thumbnails. Do you have an artist you admire (or more than one)?

Saira Vargas (https://www.instagram.com/sairasays/) is a huge inspiration to me due to the fluidity of all of her character drawings. They all swoop the viewer in and follow them out of their form with amazing line-less grace I wish to have! Jewel Suan (https://www.instagram.com/swansgarden/) also has stunning art that conveys human body motion in such dramatic and silhouette-perfect ways, it's like feeling a good stretch! Is there an artwork you are most proud of? Why? I was in my first zine recently and I finished this piece https://www.instagram.com/p/BxHeJLUlfWq/ for it. I feel like I colored it exactly the way I want to continue doing so, and as something that matches my style. I was also really proud of the lineart being crisp, since I had struggled to find a brush that I was comfortable enough with the maintain a look like this. I did it within a couple of weeks, and though I'm disappointed I didn't try shading it very much, I love the overall mood and movement of it!

Do you listen to music (or tv shows/films/anything else) when drawing? I often listen to Jenna Marbles podcasts or video game soundtracks, such as Night in the Woods or Pokemon Colosseum!

image source: [X] What makes art interesting for you? The fact I can make silly thoughts comprehensible in an organized way! Sometimes in a goof-infused organized way. What do you do when art block strikes? It's not often, but when this happens I try and take breaks so I can focus on my surroundings and genuinely absorb all the things I appreciate in life. This knocks me out of my funk, but I always take an extra minute to realize my art is from people whose hearts I love and remember it's not all for the art, but for those who watch/look at it, so I can make sure I don't forget the reason I make it. What’s the most valuable art advice you’ve ever received?

Make multiple iterations of everything you do! Your first idea will always suck, your second will have already been thought of, and your third can be the rock ready for polish.

#Sam Howard #artist spotlight #red zone artists #red zone

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jeenonamit · 7 years ago

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I need more of that porn fic. Porn star Ben I can’t get enough of.

Your wish is my command. Here’s part 3 of the Ben Solo: Porn Star AU. ;) (Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here.) There will be a fourth, final part coming (heh…) in a few days. :D

I cannot thank you enough for your support of this crazy story! That goes for everyone who’s left me such supportive comments the past few days

Rey closes her eyes and wills her heartbeat to slow tosomething approaching a normal rate.

And then, she decides to just rip this thing off likea Band-Aid.

“I… saw you last night,” she murmurs.

Ben frowns, obviously confused. “Um… no. At least, I don’t think so?” He raises aneyebrow at her. “I stayed in last night.”

Rey shakes her head in frustration. “No. No. Not likethat.” Is she blushing? She must be. Her face feels like it’s on fire. Is itpossible to pass out, or even die, just from sheer embarrassment? “I saw you… online.”

She says the last word very slowly, drawing it out foremphasis.

It takes a while for Rey’s meaning to sink in. When itdoes, though, the effect is immediate and explosive. Ben’s eyes go wide, andhis face – already pale to begin with – goes white as a sheet.

He stands up, and shoves back his chair so forcefullyhe knocks it over in the process. Itcrashes loudly to the floor.

The handful of other people in the library turn tolook at them, annoyed.

“Oh, god,” Ben says in a hoarse whisper. He looks –sounds – utterly terrified. “You… youmean you saw…?” He can’t say the rest of the words, but Rey knows he knowsexactly what she saw.

Rey buries her face in her palms. This is horrible. “Yes,”she admits from behind her hands. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea you were in it,I swear. My stupid friend Rose knew about it, apparently, and said I shouldcheck it out.”

She chances another glance up at Ben. To her surprise,his expression has gone from terrified to furious.

“Your… friend. Rose,” Ben repeats, very slowly. His words are clipped and precise, likehe’s trying very hard not to fly into a rage right then and there.

Rey has never seen him like this. Just how much is there to Ben Solo that she doesn’tknow?

“Um…. Yeah. My friend. Rose Tico,” she confirms,confused.

Ben picks his chair up off the floor very deliberatelyand sits down again.

He groans, long and loud. He closes his eyes.

“I am going to killher for this,” he mumbles.

They get kicked out of the library a few minutes laterfor making too much noise.

Not knowing where else to go, they make their way toCoruscant’s, a fancy coffee shop near the library that’s open late.

After they get their drinks he gives her the wholestory.

“I filmed that series about… I guess it was a yearago,” he explains. He shrugs, trying to go for casual – like none of this isany big deal at all. Only the blush he’s had on his cheeks for the past twentyminutes betrays how embarrassed he is. “I needed money, and so I did some nudemodelling for the art department. Someone in the class approached me with thisopportunity because I have such a big… um.” He looks away from her. Stares downat his hands. He shrugs again and clears his throat. “Anyway. I took the job.”

Rey nods over her latte, hoping she isn’t turning asred as Ben is right now, and trying to take all of this in.

“And I mean… I’m not ashamed of any of it,” he adds.

Rey puts down her mug. “Good,” she says emphatically.“You shouldn’t be. You were paid for a job and you… you know.” She picks at thehalf-eaten scone on her plate with her fingers. “You did it well.”

Ben’s eyes widen in surprise at her comment, but herecovers quickly. He looks away from her, busying himself with arranging thenapkins in the dispenser.

“Um. Sure,” he says, his blush deepening. “I just neverthought people I knew would find out about it.” He closes his eyes and shakeshis head. “I can’t believe Rose told you to watch that. Especially since I told her how long I’ve been trying towork up the nerve to…”

He trails off, and hides his face in his hands,groaning again.

Rey’s eyes go very wide.

“Hold on a minute,” she says, feeling a bit like theworld is now tilting on its axis. “You know Rose?”

When Ben doesn’t respond, she adds: “And you’ve been tryingto work up the nerve to do what, exactly?”

After a very long moment Ben sighs, and answers herfirst question. “Rose Tico was one of the students in that art class. Which iswhy she knows about this… other, project I did.” He clears his throat. “We’vesort of kept in touch, I guess. Though after I kill her for telling you aboutthose videos, I’m not sure she’ll want to keep in touch with me anymore.”

Rey blinks, trying to process this information.

She had no idea Rose knew Ben.

Why didn’t she tell her?

But more importantly, there’s still something criticalBen’s not telling her. He hasn’t answeredher second question yet and doesn’t seem inclined to.

And so she asks him again, very quietly: “You’ve beentrying to work up the nerve to do what, Ben?”

He looks at her for a long moment without sayinganything, as though searching for the right words. Then he lets out anotherlong sigh, and scrubs a hand over his face.

He takes his glasses off, the way he did earlier inthe library, and puts them on the table between them. Rey’s eyes are drawn tohis hands again, just as they had been earlier. The large, broad palms. Thelong, dexterous fingers. His fingertips.

In his dark, serious eyes Rey sees a mixture of hope,nervous anticipation, and fear.

He swallows.

“Rose has probably ruined everything,” he begins.“But… I have something to tell you.”

#ifoundthedevilifoundhiminalover #reylo #kylo ren #galacticprideandprejudice #spacedarcy #ONE MORE INSTALLMENT AFTER THIS ONE lol #myfic

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jerseydeanne · 6 years ago

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Does anyone know who Prince Edward really is? The Queen's youngest son is not the kind of man to draw attention to himself if he can help it.

So headlines in recent days mocking him as 'Air Miles Eddie' must have caused him considerable discomfort.

Unusually for him, he used a private executive jet as well as a helicopter over two days on public engagements in Dorset and the West Midlands — engagements that he could easily have carried out by road or rail.

The cost to the taxpayer was in the region of £13,000 rather than just a few hundred pounds, giving rise to accusations that he was guilty of 'a blatant abuse of public money'.

What is strange about this is that ever since he was forced to give up a commercial life as a TV producer, he has been extremely careful, as a full-time royal, to do everything by the book — so very different from his demanding brother Prince Andrew. So what has changed?

The theory among courtiers is that the Earl of Wessex fears he and his wife Sophie are in danger of being eclipsed from the excitement of the royal show. He wants to raise their profile.

Tuesday — the opening day of Royal Ascot — was the couple's 19th wedding anniversary.

But it was the glamorous Meghan who inevitably attracted all the attention.

All this came on top of those extraordinary pictures of the newest royal and the Queen in highly animated conversation as they carried out engagements together in Cheshire last week.

Sophie, of course, has been the Queen's favourite family companion for some years.

The theory among courtiers is that the Earl of Wessex fears he and his wife Sophie are in danger of being eclipsed by Meghan (pictured with the Queen). He wants to raise their profile

The former PR girl, now 53, rides out with the Queen at Windsor and also goes carriage driving with her father-in-law Prince Philip, whom she calls 'Papa' (just as Princess Diana did).

'She makes him laugh, which with Philip is half the battle,' says a friend.

On most Sunday afternoons they and their children Louise, 14, and James, ten, have 'five o'clock tea' with the Queen at Windsor Castle, usually in the Oak Room.

These are precious private moments, where the Queen herself pours the tea, and not even the personable Meghan is ever likely to take Sophie's place there.

But, in their official lives, Edward and Sophie, as senior royals, have never enjoyed the same kind of public affection and enthusiasm as the other members of the family.

Indeed, there are several spoof Prince Edward social media accounts which purport to share his homespun royal thoughts, such as: 'Don't you know that feeling in the morning when you are full of energy?! Nah, me neither.'

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However, the real Edward, 54, is keen to be taken more seriously, especially as he is expected to be elevated from an earl to a duke and inherit his father's title, the Duke of Edinburgh.

He has been chairman of the board of trustees of the Duke of Edinburgh's International Award Foundation for the past three years and travels extensively.

But the fallout of his embarrassing commercial history, and, of course, Sophie's, too, still weighs heavily on them.

Edward's dreams of a life away from the royal ribbon-cutting routine finally ended in 2011 when Ardent Productions, the television production company which the prince set up in 1993 with £300,000 of his own money, was dissolved.

The company's most spectacular achievement was the ignominy and very public criticism it faced in 2001 after it had a crew film on the St Andrews university campus while his nephew Prince William, newly arrived as a student, was there.

This move was an apparent contravention of an agreement with the media to leave the young Prince William alone.

The Duchess of Sussex, 36, is pictured on the first day of Royal Ascot in Berkshire this week

For her part, PR Sophie famously fell foul of a Sunday newspaper sting in 2001 in which she talked about the Royal Family and other prominent people to a potential 'client' who was, in fact, an undercover reporter.

She described the Queen as 'the old dear' and Cherie Blair, the then Prime Minister's wife, as 'absolutely horrid, horrid, horrid'.

She also created a memorable 'royals for hire' storm when, just three months after becoming the Countess of Wessex, she posed beside a Rover car at the Frankfurt Motor Show having secured a £250,000 contract to publicise the model.

After this, the couple had to throw in the commercial towel, and no one can say that, in subsequent years, they haven't worked hard to rehabilitate themselves.

For Edward, this would not be difficult, as he was the Queen's last child and Philip's favourite son.

In Sophie, the Queen saw her special qualities as a royal consort — ones that blended perfectly with her own quiet approach to duty.

Pictured: The Earl and Countess of Wessex, Edward and Sophie, are pictured at Ascot

And Sophie is very much a modern royal in the sense that she is surprisingly self-sufficient.

She does her own hair, sometimes drives herself to engagements and prefers to make her own 'briefing' notes without the help of a lady-in-waiting.

The daughter of a tyre company executive from Kent, Sophie seems to have little use for airs and graces.

It is Edward who is increasingly indignant — and has at times been furious — at the 'downgrading' of their royal status.

With Meghan's arrival, that can only be exacerbated.

For her part, Sophie has never been troubled by slipping down the official rankings. The

subsequent arrivals of two new royal duchesses — Camilla in 2005 and Kate in 2011 — meant Sophie, a mere countess, dropped down to fifth.

Princess Anne, Charles, the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Edward, the Countess of Wessex and the Queen are pictured left to right at Ascot in Berkshire this week

The arrival just last month of another duchess, Meghan, pushed her down to sixth — and in the quaint custom of royal protocol she has to curtsy to the Duchess of Sussex (and to the Duchess of Cambridge), whereas she only has to curtsy to Sophie if Prince Edward is with her.

So in what is the highly competitive world of life inside palace walls, one can perhaps understand Edward's anxieties, especially as 'the firm' moves towards his eldest brother Charles's plans for a slimmed-down monarchy.

Edward was even angrier than Prince Andrew when, together with Princess Anne, they were excluded from the Buckingham Palace balcony for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee flypast in 2012.

And yet, for Sophie, relative anonymity — one might even call it obscurity — has been a blessing.

It has meant she continues to drive the children to school in Ascot and Windsor like other school-run mums, and can have informal lunches with girlfriends, confident in the knowledge that people won't keep pointing her out.

However, friends explaining her appreciation of being able to live life as a normal family conveniently overlook the 57-room Bagshot Park, a rambling Victorian mansion which is their home in Surrey.

Though it should be pointed out that a large part of the place is office space and they occupy only about a quarter of it.

Their support staff are based in offices there, rather than in Buckingham Palace, and they have a relatively small domestic staff of a 'house manager' and an assistant, a chef, two cleaners who live out and a full-time nanny.

Sophie's father Christopher Rhys-Jones, 87, often stays with them.

Since Sophie's mother died in 2005, he has become a regular name on the guest list of the Queen, who likes him very much, and he has been touched by the friendship the royals have shown him.

He was not, however, in the Queen's Royal Ascot party this week, almost certainly because he finds such major occasions a bit stressful at his age.

In this area, at least, Prince Edward finds enormous comfort.

Not for him and Sophie the excruciating spectacle of a father-in-law in cahoots with the paparazzi, for example, or, in a toe-curling television interview, revealing the private thoughts and views of his royal son-in-law.

But then Christopher Rhys-Jones is no Thomas Markle. Like Kate's father, Michael Middleton, he has kept a discreet silence on what he has seen and heard.

So can we expect Prince Edward to become 'Air Miles Andy Mark II'?

Thus far, it must be said, Edward has carefully avoided the royal pitfalls that have characterised his elder brother's life.

Yes, he has made mistakes, but he has never pursued the company of dubious billionaires and never given cause for people to describe him as arrogant.

And unlike Andrew's daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, Edward has not saddled his children with the style HRH — Louise is not a princess and James is not a prince.

'They will have to work for a living,' the Countess of Wessex has said.

So does Prince Edward really want to raise his royal profile, or is it merely a knee-jerk reaction to all the excitement and ballyhoo that has surrounded the new arrival in the family?

The one person who is likely to ensure he gets it right is his wife Sophie. He listens to her.

One friend who has known her for a long time says: 'I can almost hear her now, saying to him: 'Be careful what you wish for'.'

WOW , okay it’s Richard Kay and Geoffrey Levy

#is prince edward wife sophie worried meghan markle

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myfriendpokey · 7 years ago

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zine thoughts pt 2

where do you sell videogames? zine fairs, children's book stores, used record marts, from the trunk of a car like rudy ray moore, on etsy or on craiglist, with flyers on the wall of the local chip shop or library. through awkwardly hammered-together handmade electronic systems or the reverse, turning your game into a jumbled set of paper text and graphical fragments which can be sold in boardgame stores as some kind of reconstruct-the-narrative puzzle. you could make one-off bespoke games or game simulacra for movies that want to depict some kind of videogame being played onscreen without having to go through the licensing rights. you could ghost-develop games for wealthy people to put their names on ("american mcgee presents my life with princess diana by donald duck"). you could develop training games for the military-industrial complex, ha ha ha ha. you could get funded by the CIA to ensure the medium of videogames remains sufficiently arty and rehabilitated to function as propaganda for capitalism... i mean we already know they were involved with the paris review and iowa writer's workshop and all that jazz so they gotta have least a couple people on the payroll already, right, and we will all be treated to some very entertaining revelations following the inevitable freedom of information act request 15 years down the line. you could try connecting with the little self-contained fan communities for things like touhou, fnaf, undertale, m-minecraft, like those renaissance artists who had to drop their patron's face in the background of some religious scene except in this case it would be one of the homestuck guys. you could make "trainers" for more popular games, or demos that could show how they "feel" without a $60 investment. you could sell small games as assets for larger ones that want to have some kind of in-universe playable arcade system without having to invent a whole new game from scratch. you could just make extremely specific forms of pornography, maybe not the worst option even, just make sure the very artistic sequences of the protagonist remembering his dead wife are broken up every now and then with scenes of him unhinging his jaw to swallow and slowly digest another, smaller sad games protagonist whole (with rumble function for controllers!!!). you could make games for all the people who are still on windows xp or earlier or have some kind of arcane video card setup that prevents them playing anything other than that one preinstalled pinball game. you could try selling them at street vendors. you could try learning another language and making games for non-anglophones that don't sound like an english-written game that was localised without much thought after the fact. you could make games for kids in the hopes that they sexually imprint on them enough to support your erotic oil paintings of the characters 10 years later, just like nintendo. you could make an extremely interesting and thoughtful videogame and then offer not to release it if the donation threshold is met, thus sparing people the emotional obligation of having yet another thing on their should-play-this-eventually list. you could develop games with some bewildering system of in-game and real-world currency interactions and then sell it to the mob as a way to launder money. you could make videogames that robots record themselves playing to upload en masse which are then watched by other robots as part of some weird, ungraspably abstract SEO economy, or better yet make robots to make the videogames as well. you could make virtual cemetary plots either private (downloadable exe) or public (hosted on the server) with their own customisable mood-themes and weather settings (dark, stormy, remember-you-will-die; sunny, quiet, circle-of-life etc). you could make prosperity orbs. you could make games for office workers or call center staff which resemble excel documents or phone system frontends from a distance. you could make games which really ARE excel files, some dense collection of interlocking hidden formulas that change to display text and ascii characters as you tab your way through. you could probably talk your way into "adapting" any of those old IPs that still float around long after anyone stopped having any particular thought or feeling about them at all, like the flintstones or ziggy or something, maybe do like those 1960s superhero cartoons where they just filmed panels from the comics - just break a 2d flintstones cartoon into constituent elements and have them hover around in a little cutout diorama that you fly thru, possibly explained in-universe as representing the 4-d vision of the great gazoo. you could make games that play themselves, for the depressed. you could become a ghastly serial m**derer where after each crime you upload a new game to itchio which will reveal the name of your next victim, and costs only $9.99, and of course everyone buys and plays it because the police have put up a reward for solving the crime because they can't get past the dinosaur on level three, and all seems lost until some plucky young computer student who found the game on a friend's hard drive manages to solve the riddle hidden within the game's structure, following the clues, to an old castle, she knocks on the door, it's opened by, yes, it's will wright, wearing a wizard outfit, who tells her that by dint of solving all the puzzles she is now invited to join that mysterious organization known as "The Elect" which is assembled from the finest minds in all game design with a view to secretly controlling the world economy (via "werewolf blood", somehow), that she need only complete the ceremony by sacrificing one untutored soul, he holds out an ornate knife, she hesitates........

the question is where to sell videogames rather than how because for the most part we already know how - there are a million more or less instructive articles out there about hitting up conventions or talking to the press, and it's not that they're wrong, exactly, more that they expect to be applied in an environment that no longer exists. but what should preface and qualify the idea of sheer volume swamping the indie games market is that, outside of a few small pockets, there never really was an "indie games market" to begin with - indie games drew and mostly still draw on the existing videogames market, rather than constituting a new one. it's telling that the glory days of indie games were just the ones where they were able to draw upon some of the same privileges larger titles already had in the ability to access that same audience - being frontpaged by steam, say, or making it onto a comparatively closed console platform, or generating earnest thinkpieces... you could say that they were tapping into structures the industry had already built but had not yet occupied to full capacity.

of course there are exceptions and various efforts to set up new economies for small weird interactive things (like patreon, or game bundles), and some efforts to reach outside the existing games audience likely were successful - but when we think of indie games "functioning" economically, whether that means supporting a small team, a single person, or just hitting minimum wage per hours spent, i believe we're mostly still talking about ones which are built around the existing games economy. which is fine, but i think it's also intrinsically precarious in ways which maybe get glossed over in discussions of the "indiepocalypse" - are all those new steam releases really causing a problem or are they just exacerbating a structural limitation which was already always there, a reliance within the indie game economy on a certain lucky-few-ism which just became grossly more noticeable the more disproportionate it got?

of course it's easier to be dismissive after the fact, and my fantasy about "where" to sell videogames is partly a fantasy of them having a location to begin with - of attaining something of the grounded and immutable appearance of the non-digital, as though brick and mortar stores don't have a relationship to the likes of amazon as basically precarious as any online storefront. and there are also real and obvious reasons why the various videogame audiences all tend to clump together - similarities in terms of the hardware required, the inputs allowed, of visual and cultural reference points, to say nothing of the personal / professional histories of the people involved in each. we are all contained within "the medium"...

so maybe it's also a fantasy of starting to pick apart that conception of the medium. i think small game developers already have more in common with artists or musicians working on the fringes of their respective industries than they do with even moderately successful teams within the same format, and use similar language, engage in similar forms of practice - particularly as near everything comes increasingly mediated by the digital these days. i think they already ARE working in similar spaces to some extent, whether it's social media sites or digital storefronts or meatspace stores pushed by necessity not to specialise. and without wanting to be paranoid (or moreso than the CIA thing, at least) i think we should be cautious of the way a certain focus on mediumicity can obscure these overlaps. a "new medium" is one which inherently pushes against the image of one as grouded ahistorically in some eternal human verity or other (where each medium supposedly embodies some different mode of perception / medieval humour / ninja turtle etc) - it is to see firsthand the way in which supposedly eternal, neutral qualities are materially constructed, which includes seeing forms of social organisation and usage become mystified into extrahuman conditions. and given their basis in technology that includes drawing from wider trends in the use of that technology as a whole - which specifically, in tech circles, can mean more and more tightly interlocking systems of proprietary knowledge and speculative capital, as well as "new mediums" constructed so as to be inseperable from some storefront, website or monitoring technology. i don't think anybody will necessarily break even taking their games to a zine fair (not that they're breaking even now). but i do feel like trying to build networks across those medium boundaries could be more valuable in the effort to build some sustainable environment for these things than any amount of reform within the house that tech built.

[PS: it occurs to me that you could plausibly argue that the very bagginess of medium-centric formulations is what makes them valuable, in forcing many different groups to butt against each other on one platform rather than just disperse into echo chambers. but i think exactly the reverse is the case: nobody really engages with each other's work in artgames because the stakes are simultaneously too small and too large. they're too small in that however much i might be picky about another person's work - and i think it's this vague pickiness or sense of not-quite-right-ness that drives the most searching critiques - it still feels pointless to pursue that instead of the glaring, omnipresent faults of the big AAA players, which means more complaining about far cry for all eternity. and they're too large in that most small game development is so precarious that it's not really worth the risk of knocking someone out of the circle over penny-ante shit. only with both economic security and broad similarity of outlook can a truly vital, human culture of spiteful cattiness begin... our day will come]

(image credits: Eco Fighter, World Heroes 2 ,The Space Adventure, Nancy)

#zines #vgames #talk talk

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castingdirect · 4 years ago

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IMMORAL PROFITS: Why Are Big Corporations Still Allowed To Profit From Rape Videos?

This article isn't about ethical pornography, it's about rape and sexual abuse and big corporations that are allowed to profit from human misery A Canadian student says: 'I've not problem with consensual adults making porn. Who cares?' but the problem is that many people in pornographic videos, especially those on user submitted content generated video tubesites. Just after she turned 14, a man had enticed Jane* to engage in sexual play over Skype, and he recorded her, and posted a clip, along with her full name, on XVideos, one of the worlds most-visited pornography tubesites. Google searches helped direct people to this illegal footage of child sexual abuse. Jane had recounted how she begged XVideos to remove the clip, but instead, said the website hosted two more copies, so hundreds of thousands of people could leer at this most mortifying moment of her life, preserved forever as if set in amber. That happens all over the world: Women and girls, men and boys, are sexually assaulted or secretly filmed, and then a video is posted on major websites like XVideos that draws traffic through search engines, while the initial video assault may be brief, the attack on dignity becomes indeterminable. 'The shame I felt was embarrassing,' Jane had said. Mr Kristof wrote in December about Pornhub, a Montreal-based website that pioneered access to free porn uploaded by anyone - so called tubesites that are like YouTube but orientated to the adult market and selling nudity and sex. Since the article was written and published, credit card companies have stopped working with the tubesite, and the site has removed more than nine million videos in response, with the Canadian and US Governments cracking down on the company's practices. However this isn't isolated to one company. It was noted at the time, that exploitation is rooted not in a single company, but in an industry that operates with some impunity and punishing one corporation may simply benefit it's rivals, after all, remove a brick, it makes a building unstable, knock enough bricks, the wall comes tumbling down. That's what is happening here because when Pornhub deleted videos, millions of outraged customers flooded to it's nemesis, XVideos, which has even fewer scruples. A veteran European Pornographer called Pierre Woodman, said that while Pornhub has been damaged financially, XVideos see Mr Kristof as a 'Santa Claus In Newsprint'. That's not a comfortable feeling and it doesn't sit right, and we need to knock more bricks out of the wall, rein in the entire rogue industry, and for now, the behemoth that is XVideos, bolstered by Google, and other search engines. 'We are the biggest adult tube in the industry, with an average of two billion daily impressions worldwide,' boats XVideos, which SimilarWeb ranks as the seventh-most-visited website in the World. Two slots behind is a sister website with almost exactly the same content, XNXX.com, and each get more visitors than Yahoo, Amazon or Netflix. XVideos and XNXX appear to be owned by mysterious French Twins and based in a nondescript office building in Prague not far from Wenceslas Square. This building is the hub of a porn empire that gets six billion impressions a day and inflicts anguish all over the world, and raises an important question - Why do they get away with this? Heather Legarde, a young woman in Alberta, felt the world crashing down on her last August, when she had discovered that her ex-husband had posted intimate videos of her online, and she said that people around the world were gazing at her naked body. 'I'm all over the internet,' she said sadly; 'Not what I wanted to be famous for.' What's worse, in one video her former husband sexually assaulted her as she lay unconscious on the bed, which Legarde had no recollection of the assault and no idea how the video was made, apart from a clue in the tag: 'Sleeping Pills.' Some 200,000 people had watched her being assaulted while she was drugged and unconscious, so on that day in August, mortified and dizzied by the betrayal, Legarde prepared to tie a noose. 'I was standing in my garage under a beam, holding a rope,' she recalled. But finally, she changed her mind: 'I said to myself, "If this is your solution, he'll do this to someone else tomorrow".' So Legarde resolved to own her story and fight back: 'So it doesn't have to happen to other girls.' That's why she agreed to be quoted by name in the Times column, but her path through the life is now paved with daily humiliations, she regularly finds herself searching for her naked videos and begs websites, sometimes successfully, to remove the ones she finds. 'How do you get your head around 200,000 guys masturbating as you're being assaulted?' she mused. A great majority of videos on XVideos and other tubesites are not of children or of unconscious women, most of the bodies are writing by choice. But it's easy to find videos where the posting or the activity wasn't consensual. A major study published by the British Journal of Criminology this year found that one in eight videos on three major tubesites - XVideos, Pornhub and XHamster - depicted sexual violence or nonconsensual conduct. Some show intoxicated or unconscious women or girls being raped, while others are from spy cams in locker rooms or breach changing rooms and show unsuspecting women or girls, (and, less often, men and boys), undressing or showering. Racist epithets and humiliation are on display; as are misogynistic videos of supposed feminists being degraded and tortured, and many of the videos depict rapists, real or fake, forcing sex on children or adults who are trying to fight back. One on XVideos was captioned with a girl's protest: 'This is not right, Daddy, stop, please.' XVideos guides viewers to videos that purport to show children: Search for 'young,' and it helpfully suggests also searching for 'tiny,' 'girl,' 'boy,' 'juvencita,' and 'youth porn.' Many of those on the screen will be young-looking adults, but some will be minors whose lives have been badly damaged. 'I think about suicide,' a Thai girl called Jenny* said, and she explained that when she was in eighth grade, a man reached out to her on Facebook and suggested that she could make money form modelling, and he advised her to send videos of herself, including naked videos to give a sense of her body; these would be kept strictly confidential, she was assured. Jenny sent him the videos, but she was never paid as promised, and said she forgot about the whole episode - until a friend had alerted her that her naked videos were on XVideos, Pornhub and at least one other site. 'I just wanted to die,' Jenny said: 'I didn't want my parents to know.' Jenny is smart and well educated, and is a beautiful singer, and she had hoped to become a music star in Thailand: 'I don't think that's possible now,' she stated: 'My dreams are going to end because I have naked pictures on the internet.' The Hug Project, a nonprofit in Thailand that works with trafficking victims, got XVideos to remove Jenny's videos, but Jenny quit school because she couldn't handle the humiliation and every day she gets messages from strange men, sometimes with photos of their genitals. Jenny is furious with herself for sending the videos: 'I had the potential to do something great, but now I can't,' she said. She agreed to be quoted, despite her shame, because she wanted other kids to understand that in the internet age, some mistakes are forever. The abusers aren't limited to obscure pornographic websites either. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and other sites are all sprinkled with child sexual abuse imagery. One woman, Adrianna*, from Illinois, had been trafficked, and her pimp had posted naked video clips of her that had been sitting on Twitter for six years; she said Twitter had ignored her pleas to remove them. When asked to have them removed after the fact by a prominent Times writer though, and they were removed within hours. Not everyone has the opportunity to rely on Newspaper columnists to aid them though in order to get nonconsensual nudity removed, and it's not a scalable solution either. Meanwhile a web search of Adrianna were still on XVideos, despite her efforts to have them removed, and they had collectively been viewed more than 100,000 times. 'The trafficking was one thing,' Adrianna had said: 'But I feel I'm being exploited all over again.' Google is a pillar of the sleazy ecosystem, for roughly half the traffic reaching XVideos and XNXX appears to come from Google searches: 'The porn tube sites are obsessed with their Google rankings because Google is their lifeline,' said Laila Mickelwait, the president of the Justice Defense Fund, which fights against online sexual exploitation. 'Google is the primary means by which they drive traffic to their sites.' A recent search with the words 'rape unconscious girl' using Google's video tab directed people to scores of videos celebrating just that, including one in which a woman first appears to be strangled to death (presumably acting) and then her 'corpse' was violated. A google search subsequently done for 'Schoolgirl Sex' turned up video results of teenagers having sex of all kinds (on a bus, with a 'stepbrother,' etc.) on XVideos and XNXX, with most of the people in the videos possibly over 18, but no way to be verifiably sure. The Times reached out to Google to help them understand its reasons for complicity with companies that monetize from child sexual abuse, but there were no satisfactory responses. Google has it's limits though, and when the Times reporter tried to search 'How do I poison my husband,' the results were literacy or humorous, not how-to instructions. The top responses to 'How Do I Commit Suicide' were for a suicide hotline. So Goole can demonstrate responsibility, it can demonstrate and remove toxic moral materials, so why not rape videos? XVideos and XNXX appear to be owned by the twins Stéphane and Malorie Deborah Pacaud (sometimes rendered as Deborah Malorie Pacaud). The Pacauds, 42, avoid the media and didn't respond to any inquiries, but others in the industry said that Stéphane Pacaud began the business in about 2001 by copying images from pornographic magazines and putting them on a simple website that became XNXX. Fabian Thylmann, who helped build what became the Pornhub empire before selling it, described Stéphane Pacaud as a loaner who devoted himself to his websites and other solitary pursuits. 'Even when in Vegas for conventions, he was often just in his hotel room working,' Thylmann said in 2012, and when he offered to buy XVideos for $120 million, but Pacaud cut off the discussion and said he had to get back to playing a video game. 'I'm too busy,' Pacaud had said, as Thylmann remembers the conversation: 'I've no time to discuss this now. I'm playing Diablo II.' The Pacauds' empire became WGCZ Holdings, a company that appears to have been recently renamed to WebGroup Czech Republic. It controls at least 60 companies worldwide, including some in the United States. Many of us were inspired by Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution in 1989: Is it too much to ask that the heirs of that revolution not inflict rape videos on the World? The Czech police and prosecutors say that they are investigating XVideos and tis affiliated sites, and the Czech press is publishing exposés about WebGroup's practices. Under pressure, XVideos has removed some paedophile search terms over the past few months, but the clean-up doesn't go that far, with a search for 'twelve' on XVideos suggesting 'related searches' of 'training bra,' '7th grader,' and 'elementary,' according to the Times. So what can be done and how can it be done, how long will it take, and will it be effective? A starting point is going to be to recognize that the issue is not pornography or the pornography industry at all. The issue is about child exploitation, and how we can be sex positive, and exploitation negative. It's a fair objection that cracking down on illegal pornography is sometimes a game of whack-a-mike, but while oversight won't eliminate problems of the internet, it can vastly help reduce them. Copyright protection is a priority for U.S. Government, so mainstream porn companies mostly have learned not to steal content; when they do, they get sued and lose. If the United States and other Group of 7 Countries cared as much about abused children as about video piracy, maybe it can make XVideos equally vigilant about rape videos. While there are no simple solutions, there are three steps that could help. First, PayPal and Credit Card Companies should stop working with ALL companies that promote illegal videos and not just single out Pornhub. PayPal in particular props up XVideos because it used to pay for ads, Mastercard took the important step of announcing that porn websites can only carry on accepting payments if they verify age and consent of each person in sex videos; other card companies could follow suit, and should follow suit. Second, search engines should stop leading people to rape videos and stop directing people from the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo to websites with a long record of distributing them. Third, we should create accountability in criminal and civil law, for that's the best way to incentivize companies to clean up their act. In March a girl who was trafficked at 14 and forced to appear in sexual videos filed a lawsuit against XVideos, but such a suit faces difficulties under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Bipartisan legislation before the House and the Senate would make these suits easier to pursue, which could be a gamechanger by harnessing capitalism to induce better corporate behaviour. 'There's always some enterprising lawyer waiting to pounce,' said Marc Randazza, a lawyer who has represented XVideos and also victims of nonconsensual porn: 'If you put civil remedies in, you would have a platoon of lawyers fighting to help you if you were a victim of nonconsensual porn.' Facing this privatized accountability, companies like XVideos would themselves rush to remove nonconsensual imagery, and we would have aligned the interests of porn king pins and their 14-year-old victims. Some worry that a crackdown would financially harm sex workers who sell videos of themselves, but these three steps would not kill that porn industry, or the porn industry in general. People in the adult content industry say that companies like XVideos have a perfectly good business model with just consensual adult content. Without accountability, corporations are tempted to avert their eyes, the most exploitative companies profit the most, and this creates a race to the bottom. The cost is borne by the unsuspecting children and adults who often didn't know their content is there in the first place. A 16-year-old girl in Perth, Australia, a good student and popular in school, took a naked photo of herself while standing in front of a bathroom mirror, and she sent it via Snapchat, so that it would automatically disappear in seconds, to her 17-year-old boyfriend, with the words: 'I love you. I trust you.' The boyfriend took a screenshot before it disappeared and shared it with five of his friends who in turn shared it with 47 of their friends, and within a few days, more than 200 people in the school had a copy. Someone uploaded it to a porn site and named the girl and her school; over three months, and with the help of online searches directing people to the site, the photo was downloaded 7,000 times. The family moved to a different city, but students there found the image as well, so the family fled to a different state in Australia. Paul Litherland, a former Australian police officer who worked on the case, said that the photo was posted on porn websites all over the world, and she felt she could never escape. She refused to attend school, and she self-medicated with drugs. Then at the age of 21, she took her own life. These are the stakes in which people are gambling with every day. There is more than financial and monetary gain at stake - lives are at stake! *Names changed to protect identities of victims. Read the full article

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kylerenpenning · 4 years ago

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Audience Studies (3P18) Blog #2

Week 6

In week 6, the material looks to cover the uses and gratifications of media theory for online users, outlining the criteria that determine what makes an audience, as well as, exploring what motivates users to consume digital media, and examining the link between audience members conscious choice and the unconscious effects of their choices. In the lecture, we discussed the uses and gratifications theory which was interesting because it offers a glimpse of the evolution we have experienced throughout the decade because the technologies that are now used to explore audiences has served researchers well and are being used to draw upon more detailed, accurate conclusions on audience behavior and interactions. The theory understands that audiences have a goal in mind (active), that they are selective in the content that they choose to consume, they can be discriminative towards opposing ideologies, and finally that audiences make choices and can explain why we are making these choices (self-aware).

The most prominent example from my life where I can see this theory being applied is through my university experience. The students can be recognized as active audience members because we are constantly participating in literature in our classes with the goal in mind to graduate and get a job. Students at brock university like myself are selective in the content we choose because we were all given a large variety of choice for programs when we first applied, and each individual chose the program that best suited themselves and the one that would help them make a career from the content they will learn. Each program can be viewed as a different audience that is part of a much larger audience which is Brock University as a whole. With regards to the discriminative part of the uses and gratifications theory, I have experienced in seminars people being discriminative towards ideas students present because they do not agree with what they propose. Although it is in a respectful manner, many dialogues in my seminars throughout the years have involved a disagreement and the two parties are trying to find some sort of middle ground to agree upon. This flows right into the self-awareness aspect because within the dialogue they can elaborate on their positions and provide an explanation on why they support the things they do which proves that audience members are self-aware of their beliefs for the most part.

The next area of focus this week which was really interesting to me was reading the research article that looked at what motivates users to consume digital media. The article’s main concern was to distinguish the differences between gratification sought and gratification obtained from the consumption of media content. For this distinction to become a reality, they defined gratification as ‘expectancy of a certain outcome as a function of certain behavior’ (Mirjana Pantic. 2 April 2019) The article teaches us that media use as ‘functional’ is important to understand because it implies that audience members seek out some sort of goal in the things they do as audience members, and we as audience members are looking to gain a sense of gratification through obtaining the goals we set in place for ourselves. Whenever my friends and I get heavily into a video game we tend to start competing against each other to see who is the best one at the game. In this case, being considered the best out of the friend group would be considered the ‘expected certain outcome’ and the ‘certain behavior’ that would emerge in each of us would be more hours played on the game. We would also take the game more seriously because everyone knows they need to put time into the game and get better if they want the satisfaction of being the best out of our friend group which would be considered the audience.

Finally, we examined Blumer’s theory and the link between audience members' conscious choice and the unconscious effects their choices have. This essentially explains that the awareness we have of the thoughts in our head is what drives us to do the things that we do (conscious choice). However, our actions have an effect either on ourselves or others that we are sometimes not aware of (unconscious effect). For example, When I was a little kid I sometimes would say hurtful things to my parents and at the time my thought may have been that the things I say will get me what I wanted. Now I know that some of the choices I made in the hurtful things I said had an effect on my parents' mental health that I was not aware of simply because I was young, immature, and still learning. As a result of me agitating my parents, they would respond by being less helpful to me if I needed it and made me understand that I need to respect them because my choices have an effect on their well-being.

Week 7

This week, we headed towards interpreting and decoding mass media texts which Sullivan describes as studies that are focused on gaining a better understanding of how audiences interpret texts, especially media that contains behavior that is considered to be morally reprehensible (Granelli & Zenor, 2016, p. 5058). In lecture, we learned that large media owners have a great amount of power in society because of their ability to send out messages that a mass audience is going to be viewing and interpreting in several ways. However, the CCCS recognizes that audiences are decoders themselves, and have the ability to pick and choose which messages they believe/support. An audience experience from my life that I can see this occurring is from my time spent watching YouTube as there are a number of vloggers on the platform and with that, I get a chance to examine several personalities of influencers that are put on a pedestal in society because of their persona and the way they live. I understand the deeper meaning behind YouTube giving so much exposure to certain individuals over others is because whoever is in charge of managing what gets circulated on their platform believes that these people are model citizens and good people to look up to. I am proof that users can decode media content and challenge certain individuals that YouTube wants people to see as model citizens and I know this because I develop emotional attachments the biggest vloggers on the platform. Some of the most popular vloggers I enjoy watching, while others I despise such as Jake Paul for his irresponsible, and sometimes dangerous behavior that gets promoted as ‘cool’ and eventually is normalized to his younger audience that is still learning the difference between right and wrong and building their morals.

Another key concept we discussed this week which is supported in Sullivan chapter 6 was the reception theory and the three different outcomes of audience interpretation. The Dominant view is the position that most people claim to make the most sense and is the most widely accepted view (Sullivan, 2013, p. 148) An example of a dominant view in my life can be seen through the expectations that people have for how to handle this covid pandemic. The current dominant view is that this virus should be taken seriously in Ontario and people should stay in their homes and wash their hands more than they are ever. This would mean that the reports claiming this pandemic to be a ‘hoax’ represent the oppositional reading which is when the audience goes against the dominant view and takes the opposing side (Sullivan, pg. 148) Since the majority of audience members to this pandemic, including myself, believe that this pandemic is real and should be dealt with in a serious manner it solidifies my understanding that the oppositional group is those who think covid is not something to worry about. The final outcome of audience interpretation we learned about is the negotiated stance which is explained as supporting some aspects of the content they consume while they reject other aspects and come up with their own conclusions on the subject matter (Sullivan, pg. 148) Using the same example of the covid pandemic, the negotiated stance would be the groups of people who although believe that the pandemic is a reality and not a ‘hoax’, they may lie somewhere in the middle of the spectrum where they think the severity of the pandemic has been ‘blown out of proportion’ by media outlets and that fewer policies would not make a big difference in controlling the spread of the virus.

Another topic of discussion this week was the four modes of audience reception which aims to answer why audiences engage with certain texts and form emotional attachments to characters and themes they see within them. The first mode of reception we examined was the transparent mode which is when individuals view the text as ‘life’ and experience deep emotional attachment to the content, essentially leading them to forget that they are engaging in fictional content (Michelle, pg. 191). This reminds me of when I enjoy a tv show and the more I watch it, the more I invest emotion and time into the show, and I begin to develop my favorite and least favorite characters and when I speak about the show like they are real people going through real-life scenarios and if something bad happens to a character I like then it may change my mood during the day. This is an example of me experiencing a transparent reception because I am getting lost in the fictional content of the TV show. The next mode is the referential mode which Michelle explains as when an audience interprets content as ‘life-like’ and compares the content to things happening in their own life that they can relate it to understand better. Another type of audience reception is the mediated mode which occurs when audiences look at text strictly based on its content, without an emotional attachment to characters or themes that they may see while indulging in the content. I think of my film class when I think of mediated audiences because we take one episode a week of a television show that was aired many decades ago and we are asked to analyze the television show from a non-biased point of view, strictly to analyze the textual creativity of the content. Since we move onto a different show each week it is hard to form any emotional attachment to the characters which is why I would not classify this experience as a transparent or referential mode of reception.

Week 8

This week’s content looks at reception contexts which open discussions about the importance of digital screens being found relatively anywhere in today’s day in age, and how audience experience differs depending on the location/setting of the screening. In the lecture, it was interesting for me to hear what Sullivan had to say about how digital media has impacted Television usage. Sullivan says, “The introduction of new media technologies has not fundamentally altered the amount of television use in the home” (Sullivan, p. 171) When I look at my at-home-life experience I can see how some people would disagree with this, while others would agree with it. When I am living at Brock for school and it is just me and my roommates who are all considered ‘younger generation’ we don’t even have cable set up for our TV because we know which streaming platforms to use to watch the shows or sports we want to watch. However, when I am at home in Oakville living with my parents we have cable set up on multiple televisions because my parents, who are older, still use the traditional television for things like the news, sporting events, television shows, etc. Furthermore, I understand that television still plays an important role in society because the older generations are still around to make use out of it, but it raises the question of how will the television industry be affected in future years? When the older generation is filtered out of society in a few decades I believe that there will be a major decline in the television industry because by that point most people will have fully switched from using cable TV to using streaming platforms and alternative media sources to acquire the same kind of entertainment television has provided us with for the lat several decades.

In this week's reading, Kihan Kim and Yunjae Cheong Kihan take on “an approach that examines how viewing experiences differ based on the venues people watch sports in, rather than specifying and examining individual antecedent factors of sports viewing. The theater condition and home condition differ on multiple features simultaneously, including not only factors driven by technologies, but also social drivers of sports viewing.” (Kim, K. pg. 390) He studied the difference in the audience viewing experiences of watching sports at home vs when they watched sports at a theatre. The article concludes that because of the bigger screen size, better video and audio quality, the possibility for a 3D viewing experience, and the social factors associated with a theatre such as audience reactions, theatres are understood as the more favorable viewing experience. I can agree with this because in my family we enjoy watching movies together and most of the time we would watch movies in our own home and make popcorn and just watch on our television while being in the comfort of our living room. However, when there is a popular movie that comes out in theatres that we are all excited to see then we will go to the movies to watch for the “best experience possible”. Recently, the new Star Wars film ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ came out in theatres and since we have all been big fans of the series for a long time my parents decided to treat me and my brother to the theatre experience. During this theatre experience, I noticed the screen was ten times bigger than the tv in my house, the sound was much louder and better quality because it has a surround sound effect. Thus, I agree that viewing experiences differ based on the venues people watch them in because each venue offers different features that alter the viewing experience.

Another concept we talked about in this chapter is appropriation which helps us understand how we have formed our media contexts and rituals. This looks to examine how communication technologies are introduced into people’s lives and the different ways in which people build an understanding of what the technologies are to be used for. When I look back at my experience of being introduced to technology, I think of the first cell phone I was given for my grade 8 graduation. My parents were hesitant to give me a phone because they thought it was too early for someone who is twelve years old to have open access to the online world knowing the dangers that surrounded the popular platforms like Facebook and MSN at the time. This is what caused them to make rules like handing in my phone every night at a certain time or having to ask for permission from my parents to get certain apps. This is an example of appropriation because it focuses on the introduction of technology in my life and exposes the ways in which I have learned to use the media the way I do today.

The last concept we went over this week was ritual contexts in audiences. Rituals are formed over a long period of time and it is when you consistently do a certain set of things in preparation for/during an event. The most prominent example from my life that I can see an audience start to form rituals is when my family attends my Dad’s work celebration for Canada day every year. With my dad being a police officer in the peel region, he does what most officers do and bring their families out to celebrate with the entire police department where there are games, food, live shows, and fireworks to end the night. Since we do this every year for Canada Day and it is the same gathering, I would classify this as an audience experience that has become a ritual in my family.

Week 9

This week’s content takes a closer look at media fandom and audience subcultures. To start, we developed a definition for what classifies someone as a ‘fan’ which we concluded was a person deeply invested in content and religiously stays on top of new the content produced, as well as engaging with old content to strengthen their connection with the material. Something I found interesting when reading the Sullivan chapter was that he mentions that there are no clear boundaries in media outlets anymore due to computers becoming more affordable, and platforms that are putting a lot more power into the audience by allowing them to expand from original texts to develop their own understanding of what the content means (Sullivan, Chapter 8) A platform I see myself engaging in that aligns with Sullivan’s belief that media boundaries are difficult to see now is Reddit. Reddit is an open forum of discussion for relatively anything you want to talk about, and it happens in an online environment where anyone is able to enter a topic of discussion and converse with other random users that are interested in the same topic as you. For example, in my time on Reddit, I once entered a chatroom where people were discussing the events that took place in a movie I had recently watched called ‘Mile 22’ because I wanted to see how others' perception of the movie compared to mine. I found that the more I read through the discussions on the movie the further I advanced myself into the fandom by increasing my knowledge on the events that took place in the film through my interactions with other fans of the movie. In this case, the original text would be the movie itself, and fans on Reddit are the proof that technology has allowed users to expand from original texts, and develop their own understanding of what the content means

Week 10

In this chapter, we look at how the role of audiences has changed since the introduction of digital media through the formation of new ways in which audiences can break through the barrier of just being a consumer and begin producing their own content and meanings on certain texts.

The first aspect we discussed this week to deepen our understanding of how the audience’s role in media texts has changed over time is the concept of digitalization. This is when content that originally was only found in hardcopy versions such as books, newspapers, magazines, etc is moved to an online format where only a computer or phone is necessary to retrieve the content. The digitization of banking is a prime example of something where at one point in time, I had to physically show up to the bank to deposit cheques, view my account balances, or transfer money. Banks have digitized much of their duties so that audiences can do everything they would need to go to a bank for right from their phones. Participatory culture is another result of media text being moved online because digital platforms provide something that traditional texts could never do, which is to allow the audience to respond to the content and express their agreement, disagreement, or changes they would make to the content. When I think about my personal experiences engaging in participatory culture, I think of the course evaluations that I must complete every semester. Throughout the entire term, I am given new content that I have never seen before and in the past, it would be very hard for schools to collect data about the success of their ways of teaching. Digital media, specifically the course evaluations that are electronically distributed has opened the opportunity for me to provide feedback to my professors and TA’s without having to go through barriers that make it hard for my opinion to be heard. This proves that participatory culture has increased throughout my lifetime and will likely experience further increases in the future.

Another concept we touched on this week is user-generated content, as well as the idea that users are able to store, create, and distribute content. First, user-generated content is any form of content, such as images, videos, text, and audio, that has been posted by users on online platforms such as social media. Places where I find myself posting user-generated content are on my Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat profiles where I typically will post things that I find funny or interesting. I also sometimes store content because I know that it will be useful for me later like when a lecture is being presented and whatever is on the slide is too much content for me to quickly take notes on, I will use my phone to take a picture of the screen so that when I have the time, I am able to make the notes for the lesson. Not only does my experience prove that users are able to store content and put it into their own context, but it also exemplifies the concept of convergence because there is clearly an ability to show content across multiple devices such as the lecture screen and my phone screen.

In this weeks reading, we interrogate the dynamics and potentials of the big data paradigm in an era of user-generated content and commercial exploitation (Adrian Athique, p. 59) In the article we learn that since the introduction of media, large corporations are spending more time gathering analytics of what users are searching, posting, and buying so that they can produce products in the future that will have a greater chance of being successful in the market. I have had many scares in my life where I am shopping online, browsing through Amazon, or even just looking at imagines of commodities I am interested in obtaining and then, conveniently, the next time I go on YouTube for entertainment, an advertisement pops up on my screen for the exact same product that I was thinking about buying. This shows that corporations are using data they collect online to enhance their business success which is not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion because companies make more profit when they produce commodities and services that appeal to a larger audience. As a consumer, all this means is that as long as you are aware of the underlying meaning behind companies collecting big data and making personalized ads, you should benefit from this because, in the end, you are more likely to be exposed to products or content that appeal to you.

Overall, this semester was filled with insightful concepts that I can see myself taking with me into the real-world and applying them into my thought process to give me a better chance at having positive audience experiences.

#FunTerm AudienceStudies NewMedia

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blog-researchblog · 5 years ago

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A Frame by Frame Look at the Life of an Animator

Casey Stoneback

The Seven Questions

Growing up I’ve been asked what I want to do when I grow up. It’s the age old question many children have been asked growing up: what do you want your career to be? I’ve had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do with my life since I was in high school, but the article “7 Powerful Questions To Find Out What You Want To Do With Your Life,” helped me narrow down the type of life I want to live as an adult, beyond what career I want to have.

Not all the questions were easy to answer, and some were honestly no help at all, but the first question was very easy to answer. What am I passionate about? The one thing that I’ve been consistently passionate about my entire life is art. I didn’t really consider it as it being a legitimate career until I was in high school, but I have been making art since I was a child. Art is still a very broad field, but I can still easily narrow down what subcategory of art I’m most interested in. I’m interested in the field of animation and/or visual storytelling. Animated TV shows and movies are really important to a lot of people, including myself. I strive to be part of that process and make something that’s important to someone, which answers one of the other questions in the article: What are my goals in life?

One of my main goals related to my career is to do something with art, and more specifically make art that impacts people’s lives. Like I said earlier, I want to use animation and visual storytelling to make that impact. Moving on to smaller life goals, I want to live in a city or very close to a city, because I really want to live in a diverse area. Diversity is really important to me, and living in an urban place will put me in an area with so many people with all different types of backgrounds and stories. Some other goals are wanting to be able to travel a lot, and try working both freelance and for a studio/company just to see what both are like. These are all things I really really want to do, but leaves the question: what don’t I want to do? The last question in the article that I felt was truly insightful and important for me to answer was along those lines. What do I not like to do? I feel like this is really relevant to my career, because I know myself and I know I have zero motivation and interest in things I’m not passionate about. I really could not sustain a career outside of art, I just don’t have the drive for that. Any other field would bore, exhaust, or just plain confuse me. I know I have no choice but to give it my best shot in the animation industry, since that’s what I’m most passionate about.

With these questions and answers in mind, I wanted to know how attainable they are in the field of work I want to go into. To find out more information, I consulted the Occupational Outlook Handbook.

Outlook Handbook

According to the Occupational Outlook Handbook entitled “Multimedia Artists and Animators,” a short summary of the field says, “Multimedia artists and animators create images that appear to move and visual effects for various forms of media and entertainment.” The site also listed some specific parts of the field, and stated that most artists in it stay within one certain medium (TV, movies, games, etc). Another thing to note about this career is the work environment. In addition to that, for the most part they work normal hours, but may have to work overtime when deadlines for projects are approaching. Most artists either work in an office, or from home.

The employment of multimedia artists/animators is expected to grow by 4% between 2018 and 2028, which is the average growth for all careers. This projection is due to the fact that the demand for animation across many platforms including TV, movies, video games, etc. keeps going up and is expected to continue to rise. To be able to get a job in the field, most jobs require a portfolio to represent the artist’s work (in this case it would be mostly digital pieces), and usually at least a bachelor's degree in some sort of digital art major. Self study is also an important part of this process for artist’s to better themselves and get more experience. The handbook also lists these qualities that are essential to this career: artistic talent, communication skills, computer skills, and creativity. While this information is helpful and insightful, it isn’t very personal. I wanted to know more about the first person point of view as an animator.

An Animator’s POV

To find out more, I did an interview with my animation professor from last semester, Professor Elizabeth Schnieder. For my first question, I started with asking her what got her interested in animation, since seeing something that inspired me was a big part of me picking this career path. She said she saw the work of William Kentridge as MASS MOCA, and “fell in love with the idea of creating moving artwork.” After looking into his name, he’s an artist that specializes in prints, drawings, and animated films. I found this interesting because this is different to the inspiration I had. She had a more traditional “fine” artist that inspired her, while my inspiration was a cartoon I grew up with.

My next question felt very important to me, since it’s something I struggle with even as a student: How do you avoid burnout? She recommended planning, consistent working every day, and setting goals. She also said stepping away and coming back to look at a project with fresh eyes helped. I also asked what she does on a regular basis, and she said “I always have a cup of coffee every night at 7 pm,” (which made me laugh because I do the same thing), “and sit down to work on my personal animations for two hours at least.” This is a little bit different than what someone actively working for a studio would do, but 2 hours is still a lot of time on top of being a professor.

Another question I asked that felt important to me personally was if she had time to make art for herself, to which she simply said, “I always make time!” I really like this answer because it’s so short and simple, yet so important. I think I’ll be keeping these words in mind for awhile.

I also asked was what she felt was a major issue in the field today. Her answer was sexism. She ended it on a lighthearted note though, and said she felt optimistic that the next generation behind her will have a more inclusive workplace. She said “I’m excited to see more content from female animators, writers, and directors.” I agree with this because I’m also excited to see what productions from women will come out in the future, and as a woman I hope to be a part of an inclusive production like that someday.

The last question I asked her what current events are related to this field, and I found her answer interesting and honestly inspiring. She said “the thing about animation is that you can talk about anything and everything, so all current events can inspire your stories and content.” This precise thing is one of the reasons I’m interested in animation in the first place. I want to tell stories that are important to the world, that will make a difference in someone’s life.

A Current Event Across the World

While I felt this interview was extremely insightful, I still wanted to know more about what’s going on in the field. To see what’s going on in the world of animation, I looked for a current event within the field. One subject that kept popping up no matter what I searched was the poor working conditions and poor pay for animators in Japan’s animation industry. The article I found to be the most useful was Younger Animators Still Struggling Amid Anime Boom. This article goes over the research done by the Japan Animation Creators Association (JAniCA), which is a non-profit organization that documents and hopes to improve the working conditions in the anime industry. It also goes over some of the thoughts and solutions that Yasuhiro Irie, the Representative Director of JAniCA and an anime director himself, and Daisuke Okeda, the auditor and lawyer of JAniCA.

As the anime industry gets bigger, the profits seem to only be benefiting middle aged veteran animators, and newer/younger animators are not also being properly compensated. Workers have faced unpaid overtime, and some have even been hospitalized from being overworked.

Animators in Japan can usually be broken down into two categories: people that draw genga and dōga. Genga are the keyframe in an animation (the most important frames in a story), and dōga are the frames in between keyframes to make an animation more smooth and fluid. Dōga work is given to newcomers, and as they improve and gain experience, they should move up to working on genga. The current issue with this system, is that the newer animators may quit before getting to move up in the industry simply because they don’t make enough money to survive. According to the most recent JAniCA report, the average monthly income for animators between the age of 20-24 is only ¥128,000 (1,168.47 US dollars).

In the article, Irie and Okeda gave their thoughts on possible solutions to solve this problem. One of their ideas was for studios to negotiate with more sponsors in order to get the money to pay animators properly. Here’s how they explained it:

“Companies should also look outside Japan, to sponsors like Netflix or those in China, he adds. It’s still too early to tell whether such nontraditional sponsors will truly make a difference, says Okeda, but he notes that since last year, when multiple animation companies began working with firms like Netflix and Amazon, ‘many titles with good budgets have emerged. In terms of A-tier titles, the average budget has increased by over 30 percent.’”

One of their other ideas was more government assistance within the field. They argue that while it’s not huge, since anime is consumed globally it does bring in a significant amount of money into the country, so the industry should be compensated for that. Another solution in addition to that is moving studios outside of Tokyo where the cost of living is lower. Two successful examples of this are Kyoto Animation, located in Kyoto, and P.A. Works, located in Tomoya. While it took years for the studios to reach the successfulness they’re at now, Irie says that “‘if new studios learn from such examples, they may be able to get a head start and improve more quickly.’”

One last solution is that a might help, but unions are usually formed to negotiate with one big cooperation, and in the case of anime, it’s broken up into many smaller production companies. These are just a couple ideas to solve the issue of animators being underpaid, because there's no one single way to solve it with the snap of a finger. Irie believes that hopefully, things will change soon since more and more headlines about the poor working conditions animators work in are being published. Hopefully these issues being brought to light will push companies to change and improve.

The reason I picked this article in the first place is when I was looking for articles about news in the animation industry, the poor working conditions and pay in Japan specifically were what almost every search result was about. I’ve also heard about this problem before, so I wanted to learn more about it anyways. One reason I picked this article specifically, is because I know of one of the studios mentioned, Kyoto Animation. Not only have I seen some of the things they’ve produced, but about a month after the article was published, which was only less than a year ago, it was all over the news and internet that Kyoto Animation went through a huge deadly arson attack (due to the studio’s success, it was luckily able to recover through donations and is still open).

I feel as if this article is relevant to the career I’m going to into, because while it’s not about America and it’s highly unlikely I’d move to Japan to become an animator, it’s still a relevant story in the world of animation. It’s important to know what’s going on in your field of work, even in different countries. I already had a vague understanding of the issues in the anime industry, but from this article I’ve learned the specifics of the issue. I had no idea the pay there was that low. What I’d still like to know is how the working conditions in Japan compare to working conditions in America (within animation). I’m curious to know if American animators are also underpaid, even if it’s not to the extreme that Japan is going through right now.

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