#I actually did try applying to be a professor of character design at the college I graduated from but they ghosted me :/

[lone-pylon]

also adding onto that question, idk if youve shared this anywhere but im also curious how you nailed the designs for diana, the partners, and the constant - in general but also for your animatic!!! cannot emphasize enough how obsessed i am with it. i watch it at least once every day :3

Oh boy!! An opportunity to talk about my degree!!

Animation (character design in particular) has been my special interest since early childhood. I studied it professionally for two years, then studied film and film theory for an additional four.

When I design characters in my own style, I do it with personality and expression in mind.

For example, Edwards is a weaselly bastard. He’s egotistical, sly, and omniscient. Though we don’t tend to see these character elements in his face, we "see" it in his voice. The way he presents himself, the way he walks and talks. Walking and talking are both important points when it comes to designing a character. A character's posture and gait are crucial in animation when you want to show, not tell, a character's personality.

Additionally, how do they speak? How to they hold themselves? What parts of their personality shine through unspoken mannerisms? Their face? Their behaviors? The way their clothes fit their frames? Everything requires thought.

With Edwards, I gave him these beady, closely-set eyes, large, peaked eyebrows, a long face with high-set forehead, and a conniving grin with a slightly jutting chin. Is this what he looks like in-game? Of course not! The games are based on reality, and thus have to abide by set "rules". These rules don't apply in animation, they're exaggerated.

Another point: How well would their existing voices fit these designs? Will they feel seamless? Or will they sound like they’re dubbed over? Voice is an important part of my process, I need to design them as if their voices are projecting through them. It will feel awkward and uncanny if an unfitting voice comes from an unfitting character.

With Diana, for example, I wanted her personality to shine through her facial structure, and for it to feel as if her pre-existing voice would actually belong to this character: A long, straight-bridged nose, thin lips, small forehead, acorn-shaped face and large, catlike eyes. I used Meg from Disney's Hercules as inspiration for her face, particularly her nose and eyes. Every other character in this instance abides by the same process. Even Lucas, who's a literal clone of 47, has his own design traits that differ from the rest. Of course, having a full head of hair and facial hair help offset him from his clone brother, I still don't give him the exact same structure as 47.

I really don't think I can give the entire rundown of my own process, since a HUGE part of it is simply silent analysis, but if you're interested in improving your own design process, I'd highly recommend checking out artbooks for your favorite movies and games! Some might be in print but others may be digital only, or the only resources might just be from the individual artists themselves. I know I provided this link in your previous ask but I do highly recommend Character Design References.com!

[sabertoothwalrus]

Hi!! I hope it's okay to ask, which university are you/were you attending? I want to study animation in university but i have no idea which one to choose, so can you please tell me about yours?👉👈

I go to CSUF! It’s definitely one of the cheapest places to get a degree in animation in California, if not the US.

Only a handful of the California State schools offer animation, and most of the ones that do are 3D only, and I wanted to learn 2D.

SJSU has a good 2D anim program, and they’re the only state school in the bay area that does, BUT last I checked you need something like a 3.9 GPA to get in?????? like HELLO these are animation students. who are you fooling

the other schools I considered were CSULB and CSUN.

CSULB has a strong animation program! They have the guy that literally created the worldwide 24 Hour Animation Challenge. However, they required ONE extra art history class that none of the other CSUs needed, and I didn’t have it, and I wasn’t about to prolong transferring a whole other semester just to take it. (It was prehistoric art history, I think, which I admit sounds cool as fuck)

The reason I chose CSUF, beyond liking their curriculum better than CSUN, was because I heard about the Pencil Mileage Club. It’s the largest student-run animation club in Southern California. I’d argue that networking is almost more important than your actual skill. I’ll admit, the faculty is probably not doing as much for the students as other schools, but PMC more than makes up for it. I’ve made all my friends (and girlfriend teehee) through this club. I was president of my Art Club at my community college, so it was important to me to be part of PMC’s council. I’m now an event coordinator and so I help organize and run events and studio tours and guest speakers! :)) Clubs and extracurriculars look fantastic on resumes, so wherever you go, look into what’s available.

Things I should note: when you start at CSUF, whether as a freshman or through transferring, you will not be an animation major yet. You have to do the portfolio review first, and you can’t have any of the prerequisite classes in-progress when you apply. The portfolio requirement is only a few years old, too, and therefore it’s not nearly as competitive as, say… calarts or sheridan. I often say, students make the program better, not the other way around. the higher the level of students that apply, the higher the overall education quality will need to be to match that. Though this does mean that the higher quality a program is, the more people will be excluded, unfortunately.

CSUF’s aniamtion program itself is…. a little silly. You take storyboarding and character design after doing your short film ? for some reason? The new department head started at the school the same semester I did, and she’s definitely trying to make it better. She held a screening of the production classes’ finished films, and she told me she plans to have the curriculum restructured by 2025 (after I graduate, lol).

I’ll also mention that the art buildings are in the process of getting demolished and rebuilt. The first wave of new buildings won’t be done until the end of this year, and once that’s finished, they’ll tear down the remaining two buildings and start remodeling those. For now, we do a lot of our classes in the modular buildings jdhshfjs 🫡

We also have a mated pair of gay ducks that come every spring. Their names are Pebble and Rock. They are beloved by the art students.

And really, you don’t NEED a degree in animation to get into the industry. There are SO many online resources out there, a lot that are free, that can give you just as good of an education (in fact, several of my professors’ lectures have just been playing youtube videos and pulling up articles). BUT your classmates WILL be your future coworkers. If you’re not establishing relationships with people in some way on your own, you definitely need to make that bigger priority. After all, you won’t be working by yourself when you’re in the industry.

edit: oh I forgot to say that all the california state schools are striking the first week of the semester. so uh. there’s that

[heraldofzaun]

This is a post I’ve been thinking about making for quite some time, especially due to looking at how my own personal depiction of Viktor differs from what seems to be the general fandom interpretation - especially after the LoR cards released and gave us a few canonical acolytes.

I won’t beat around the bush here: this is going to be about why I personally believe that associating the Glorious Evolution specifically with headcanons about Viktor or his acolytes being trans, or Viktor performing gender-affirming surgeries, or things in a similar vein is a poor decision, and why I don’t include this interpretation in my writings. This isn’t meant to discourage people from writing Viktor or his acolytes as trans, of course - my Viktor is agender, although he’s not aware of it, and it would be absurd to say that his followers have to be cis - but I think it’s important to look at the implications that come from writing Viktor as explicitly someone who helps people relieve and manage their dysphoria through his work with the GE.

Firstly, no matter how you spin it: Viktor’s idea of the Glorious Evolution has always been painted in a negative light. I’ve done my work to portray it as idealistically as possible, but at the end of the day his goals have always been about removing (at the very least, negative) emotions from himself, as well as mechanizing himself and others.

“Desiring both to revolutionize his field and to eliminate the jealous human emotions which festered inside him, he engineered parts to replace and improve his own body... He saw himself as the patron and pioneer of Valoran's future, a future in which man would renounce his flesh in favor of superior hextech augmentations.” (Original lore.)

“He saw human involvement in any part of a process as a grossly inefficient aberration - a view that put him at odds with a great many of his fellow students and professors, who saw the very things Viktor sought to remove as the source of human ingenuity and creativity.” (New lore.)

“Jayce reported the incident [of Viktor creating a device that allowed someone to “effectively control” another person]  to the college masters, and Viktor was censured for violating basic human dignity - though, in his eyes, his work would have saved many lives. He was expelled from the college, and retreated to his old laboratory in Zaun, disgusted by the narrow-minded perceptions of Piltover's inhabitants. Alone in the depths, Viktor sank into a deep depression, enduring a traumatic period of introspection for many weeks. He wrestled with the ethical dilemma he now faced, finding that, once again, human emotion and weakness had stood in his way. He had been trying to help, to enhance people beyond their natural capabilities to avoid error and save lives. Revelation came when he realized that he too had succumbed to such emotions, allowing his naive belief that good intentions could overcome ingrained prejudice to blind him to human failings. Viktor knew he could not expect others to follow where he did not go first, so, in secret, he operated on himself to remove those parts of his flesh and psyche that relied upon or were inhibited by emotion.” (New lore.)

This, when combined with how Viktor has also always been intended as a more villainous character - his visual design language, voice lines, and how he leans into the “evil Russian scientist” stereotype all confirm that - mean that from an out-of-universe standpoint, we’re meant to see his ideas as wrong and misguided. Multiple other champions have lines specifically about how he’s wrong - Ekko calls him “everything wrong with Zaun”, Camille (who is morally grey at best, and a cold-blooded killer at worst) calls his work “quaint”, implying that it doesn’t go far enough for her liking, and Heimerdinger makes the point that without humans, no one will be left to appreciate Viktor’s work. It doesn’t matter if Viktor has good intentions - the narrative tells us time and time again that his path leads to a very dark place, especially in new lore where he’s comfortable with violating free will for the sake of preventing death.

It seems obvious to me that a character who auto-amputates as a way to cope with overwhelming emotions, who decides that emotions themselves are a burden, who is repeatedly described as having an obsession with the Glorious Evolution regardless of lore, who is described as who you go to when you’re desperate in new lore... is clearly someone whose surgeries (at least of himself, where they are implied to be unnecessary - again, auto-amputation) and end goals are supposed to be read as a violation of human nature and dignity. Here we pivot to talking about trans issues in specific.

I’m of the firm belief that it’s not a good idea to associate gender-affirming surgeries, HRT, or any other thing used for transitioning with a character whose surgeries are supposed to be read as a violation of the human form. This plays directly into the anti-trans idea that transitioning is, well, a violation of the human form. It is not a good idea to write the man who cuts off his own limbs to poorly cope with his emotions as a patron of trans rights. It’s drawing a direct parallel between Viktor’s auto-amputations, which we are supposed to read as not only a very bad thing and the product of obsession, but arguably self-harm, with life-saving medical care.

(There’s also the issue that some people seem to assume that transhumanism is, in any way, inherently related to being trans - but that’s a whole other topic that I don’t feel very qualified to write on. I consider myself someone interested in transhumanist concepts, when applied appropriately (i.e. not ending up in eugenicist territory), but I am far from an expert on transhumanist thought. I think it’s enough to say that no, they’re not related. They’re just two things with the same prefix. Please don’t confuse the two.)

In my opinion, Viktor should not be seen as someone whose work is a direct benefit to trans individuals. (Again, not to say that Viktor can’t have followers who are trans. But please, please consider before making him the person that they go to for help with transitioning. The man doesn’t even have a medical degree, and his canonical work is described as being all about function over form. He’s not the surgeon you want.) I don’t think that Viktor’s gender identity, whatever it may be, should be associated with his obsession with the Glorious Evolution - or at the least, it shouldn’t be portrayed as a positive association. (In the sense of Viktor using the GE/his own surgeries as a positive affirmation of his gender... I’m struggling to precisely define this at the moment, apologies.) The GE is, textually, an unhealthy coping mechanism.

(There’s maybe something to be said for a Viktor who has disassociated himself so far from humanity that he no longer considers gender applicable to himself... but please, be careful if you write this. I’m speaking as someone who’s agender: I’m tired of my identity being used as shorthand for someone or something becoming or being nonhuman. I’m tired of people treating Blitzcrank being reskinned as a they/them pronoun user as something revolutionary, if they themselves don’t use those pronouns or aren’t nonbinary. I’m not going to pretend that I’m the arbiter of what people can and can’t write, but I’m tired of seeing myself - as an autistic and agender person - represented solely by unfeeling aliens and machines and whatever else, and being told that it’s good, actually, because any representation is good representation. I’d like for people to be more mindful in what they write and promote, but I think that this is becoming a tangent.)

I guess it comes time for me to defend my own depiction, then, since as I’ve mentioned above I do write Viktor as agender. I admit that I want to see aspects of myself in the characters that I like, but I also strive to be aware of the implications that these aspects may have. My Viktor’s gender identity has absolutely nothing to do with his idea of the Glorious Evolution - he has no dysphoria that he attempts to relieve through his surgeries, he does not see roboticization as a way to move past the gender binary... he doesn’t even realize that he’s not a cis man, because he hasn’t had the time or tools to introspect on that aspect of himself. (He’d be rather confused if you told him that people generally tend to feel as if they’re a certain gender - he’s just... himself.) I’ve written him in this way to try to make it clear that he has always felt this way about himself - that the GE has nothing to do with it - and that it has no influence on his actions as the Machine Herald.

There isn’t really a good way to wrap this up. Again, I am not saying that Viktor or his acolytes shouldn’t be written as trans, nor trying to stop people from writing that - only that their transness shouldn’t be directly associated with his idea of the Glorious Evolution. I think that we need to be mindful of what kinds of tropes that our depictions can fall into, and in this case a non-mindful depiction of Viktor as trans can seen as equating being trans to what’s easily read as self-harm/a violation of human nature. I doubt that anyone genuinely intends this association, but it can be made regardless, and so I prefer to keep the two concepts wholly separate in my depiction.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. I’m willing to answer any questions that arise from this.

[warsofasoiaf]

Didn't know you were a fellow P&P RPG player! Which games have you played? Care to tell us about some character you have played or sharing a good adventure/anecdote?

Oh yeah, I’ve been a tabletop player for about twenty years now or so (or older depending on what you consider PBEM), and a GM for a little over 15. I’ve played plenty of systems.

I played 2e, 3e, and 3.5e Dungeons and Dragons, most of my games were Forgotten Realms, but the best games I’ve been in were either the GM’s own invented setting or Dark Sun, where our characters eventually killed Kalak, took control of Tyr, and engaged in détente with the other Sorcerer-Kings while trying to find a way to defeat the Dragon. Typically I play an elaborate plan type character with heavy points into bluff. My fellow player and DM in the World’s Largest Dungeon said that “this is exactly how Jim plays.”

I’ve played a lot of Shadowrun. I like the cyberpunk genre, and I gravitated to the role of the thief character when I could, with sniping and bombs. My favorite character is a combat engineer turned hitman who uses every dirty trick for wetwork, to the point where I actually had my own fellow players paranoid about tilted painted connected to shaped charges. Typically I played 3e or 4e Shadowrun, I haven’t been a fan of 5e Shadowrun.

I’ve played Exalted, but I’ve only played 2e. Really love the setting, though, lots to do in Creation. Solars are usually what’s available, usually I roll rather strongly on the heroic adventure type, doing my best to make my Flaw subtle but gradually increase it over the course of the story. I’ve had a lot of fun playing Sidereals to the point where I was actually told that I was banned from playing them, because I’m not allowed to have inherent bonuses for people believing my false identities. I’ve played some Lunars, I usually stick away from the beastman stuff and instead go really hard on the “getting mortals to stand up for themselves” route. I’ve only ever had one Dragon-Blooded game, where we went Brotherhood of the Peach Orchard to reform the dying Scarlet Empire.

I’ve never played Scion, I’ve only ever run Scion, but oh man, did I run an amazing game. Hopefully that doesn’t come off too conceited, but it was tabletop gaming at its finest, an enjoyable excursion with veteran and rookie players. I had a full eight-player game, where the players advanced one Legend per week, and the game ended with the rebirth of the cosmos when they rewrote the laws of the universe through theological argument.

I’ve played the core three systems from the Old World of Darkness. Vampire (scary bloodsuckers), Werewolf (fuzzy-wuzzy eco-terrorists), and Mage (a game of glorious madness) were all solid systems, even if White Wolf suffered from their inability to playtest or balance anything. Changeling: The Dreaming was a lot of fun, I had a blast playing an eshu who masqueraded as an anonymous superhero “Wandering Sky” with my friend who played a piskie samurai.

New World of Darkness, I’ve played Mage: The Awakening, and Changeling: The Lost. My best game was in college, where my friend Nate accidentally had a bear turn into a dog on TV and got Paradox’d into next week, earning him the forever nickname of “Mayor of Beartown.” My ST in that game said: “I like this game because I don’t need to do anything. You create and solve your own plots.” I’ve been wanting to play Promethean, never had the chance, because that’s a game that really lends itself well to single-player tabletop. I had another game that was interesting because it was essentially a Haruhi Suzumiya game, where the characters all played college students interested in the occult whereas I was their club sponsor, a wizard college professor who had to bail them out of their jams with liberal use of the Fortune sphere.

My longest running game that I’m currently in is a Deathwatch 40k game, where I’m a member of Kill-Team 82, a send-up to the 82nd All-American where we have nine players, one from each of the First Founding Chapters. I play an Imperial Fist Devastator Marine and specialize in siege warfare. That game is fun because in addition to the base forum thread where we go on adventures to save the Imperium of Man, we also have a thread where we just wax philosophically about our legions.

Paranoia is probably my favorite of the comedy genre, some fun Cold War slapstick made even better with liberal consumption of alcohol.

I try to enjoy games no matter the system, although sometimes it’s difficult to learn new systems. Some rules-light systems I’ve been with I had negative experiences with, like FATE where the game seemed to devolve into players continually trying to angle ways why each of their little advantages applied to give themselves bonuses on dice rolls. I also design a bunch of characters for other players who have difficulty crafting backstories, and I create parties for different games and universes in the event that I have the desire to write something in that universe, the latest of which was a seven-man party from the different City-States of Dark Sun.

Thanks for the question. Khef.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[scaredycat113]

I'm Allie: A Biography Summarized

Hey all!

My name is Alyssa, but call me Allie, let's drop the formalitiles already; we're all friends here right?When I was a kid, I always had a thing for creating new realities in my head. Now some would call this "lying", but I just think those people are close minded. As a kid, I really liked to tell stories, I mean, who didn't?! Everyone would be tuned in to your every detail, actually listening (and hopefully enjoying) the tale you spun for them. I remember the first story I ever told (only because it went so badly). I was about 6 or 7 years old and someone asked if anyone had a scary story to tell. I did not, but I was determined to tell one anyway. It was a story of a man who woke to find his whole town abandoned. Long story short, his friends played a prank on him. I know what you're thinking... not clever or scary in the slightest, but I was 8 give me a break! Everyone groned, no one liked it, but I thought, "ya know what? I kinda like telling stories." and thus the writer in me was born.

Fast forward to 2008, Step-Up 2: The Streets had just come out. I LOVED THAT MOVIE. I mean taught myself every dance and learned every line kinda love for that movie (I'll challenge anyone to a dance off). So at the ripe age of 10, I wrote my first movie. It was called Step-Up 3: The Masquerade and it was fantasic (for a 10 year old. Give me some credit). For some unknown reason, Touchstone didn't pick it up (they missed out BIG TIME), but I kept on writing. I wrote a couple of short stories and entered into competitions. I got discouraged over the years and thought, "maybe writing just isn't for me." I loved it, but it seemed like no one else liked my work as much as I did. So I changed paths.

When I was in high school, I wanted to go into international relations. I figured it would be really fun and rewarding to work with companies in different nations and try to help them breach the communicational gap. All was fine and dandy until I met my high school drama teacher, Mr. Wells. Mr. Wells had that contagious type of passion (I hope every student, regardless of subject, finds a teacher like him). We had a section where we had to write a play and I thought, "I already wrote a movie so this will be a piece of cake!". It was not. I worked for weeks on that play and turned up to class with a pile of crap. The frothy diarrhea icing on that cake was having it performed by my classmates that day so I could fully bask in the embarrasment that was my 14 page crapfest. After seeing my AWFUL play actually performed I thought, "I can do better." and so I did.

Junior year of high school we had a student-directed play festival. Of the 20-something years this festival had been going, no one entered in an original script, so I decided to enter this play festival with my new creation, a play titled, "Take a Number, Please". It was about a man who walked into a the ER with a head injury who's asked to take a number by the nurse at reception. Throughout the play, many other patients walk in with trivial injuries (a woman had lipstick on her tooth which she couldn't get off, another swallowed a bug), but the nurse lets them go through to see the doctor immediately. Turns out, the man who came in first is a patient at the hospital who periodically wanders down to the ER and complains of a head injury because he has amnesia and all of the other people walking into the ER are just in his head. Not a novel concept by any means, but it was mine and I treated it like my baby. The first night of the festival, my play was a hit. I had parents coming up to me saying how much they enjoyed my play, but the most rewarding part was hearing people laugh at my jokes and "awww" at the struggles of the characters I created. It was the highlight of my high school days, no doubt. This lit a fire under my ass.

Freshman year of college I had designated myself as a communication major, but one of the electives I signed up for was a scriptwriting class. It was the first time I really got to explore my writing and I loved every second of it. This was the year I really got to express my hidden side. A side that was a little bit dark and twisted. I wrote a play called, "Psychomachia" which boils down to "battle of spirits" or "soul war" (but Psychomachia sounded way cooler). It was about a girl who was struggling with two halves of herself, a light side and a dark side. Both my classmates and my professor loved this piece and, I'm not gonna lie, so did I. This piece was the first true expression of how I felt at the time and I cherished every second of writing it. Then I let others get to me...

"There's no money in writing." "You can't make a living off creative writing." I believed it. I figured I'd put my time into a career where I could support myself after graduation, so I stopped writing. I changed my goal back to international relations. I figured if I loved it once, I could love it again. Oh how wrong I was. I took a political science class and fell asleep as soon as the professor started talking (no dig on Prof Edwards, he was great). So I changed my goal, once again, to public relations with the hopes of becoming a social media manager, but I wasn't thrilled about it. I had no passion for it, I just figured it would give me a solid income to live on.

Spring semester of my Junior year I took a communication course called, "Gaming and Avatars". The course talked about how we can communicate all sorts of ideas through video games. This course was utterly illuminating for me. Not only did I meet my significant other in this class (shout out to my guy, KN, you know who you are), but I found my new love as well, communicating.... THROUGH VIDEO GAMES. What a crazy idea, right?! I could connect two things I absolutely loved doing... and get paid for it?? Who knew?!

So there I was, about to graduate college and questioning every decision I made in my undergrad. At this point I knew, without a doubt, that I wanted to write for video games. The problem was getting my foot in the door. I contacted countless game studios and sent my resume hoping and praying someone would give me a chance. Every studio I applied to would look at my resume and respond (if they responded at all), "We don't have any PR positions available." and I would tell them that what I really wanted to do was write. They would usually stop responding after that. So I enrolled in a master's program for creative writing hoping that it would give me some credibility in the field. But I felt like I was behind. I felt like I started late because I didn't study writing during my undergrad.

So I worked my ass off and built my portfolio. I wrote short film scripts, scripts for a web series, and I even made a game. During this time I still applied to game studios. I would send them whatever script I was working on or my game, but still no dice, until...

June 30th, 2020 (yes, I saved the date, judge me if you want). I got my first commision to write for the fantastically brilliant Rise Eterna. I was nervous and second guessing if I was really cut out for this, but there was no time to consider it; I am a game writer.

So there it is. Thanks for sticking around. I know this post was a journey, but now you know a little bit about me.

Stay tuned for more blog posts in the future (the won't be as long, I pinky swear)! Also check out my website, because I post blog content there first.

Write on,

Allie

[purplesurveys]

739

Do you enjoy watching birth vlogs? OMG never. Those are a thing? I would imagine there’d be enough butthurt people flagging them enough to be taken down YouTube, but if they’re being uploaded there and are able to stay uploaded then that’s a really good thing. I’ve seen birthing photosets on Facebook but I’ve never watched an actual video. Would you rather paint on canvas or wood? I don’t paint but if given the chance I’d probably pick canvas just because it’s more common. What regret keeps coming back to haunt you daily? Recently it’s the daily decision to keep ignoring my thesis. UHGJGHFKD I’ll do it and have it finished in May I fucking swear, I just can’t right now. Do you miss someone? I miss all my best friends, close friends, friends, acquaintances, classmates, groupmates, and everyone I’ve ever come across in school including the cats and dogs. If you could cure yourself of one allergy, what would it be? I don’t have any allergies but I wish the irritation in my eye that will occasionally annoy me like an allergy would go away forever.

Do you know anyone else with your name? Yeah when I was applying for AIESEC there were two people there with the same name and even the same spelling - I had never felt so common until then lol. I know more Robins with an i. Have you felt like the main character in a book was you? No, but I know if I read more then I will probably be able to name a character for you. Which country's flag is your favorite? Nepal’s. I also found Libya’s old flag interesting since it used to be just green with no designs whatsoever. What would you be most afraid of happening if you were to visit Africa? This has some pretty awful undertones but uhhh I’d be wary of being attacked or scammed as a tourist, which is just the same thing I’d be scared of if I went to a different continent. Where are you tempted to move to sometimes? Chicago. Have you ever hiked a mountain? I’ve hiked before, but not for a mountain. Who seems like they have the perfect life? One of my acquaintances, Chesca, is reeeeeally intelligent but also incredibly rich and funny and POPULAR and pretty and trendy and an insanely talented speaker and very well-loved. I know no one has a perfect life per se but out of all the people I observe, she’s definitely the one who seems to authentically have it all. Do you ever take pictures of negative moments? I only did that once. The only thing it did for me was remind me of how much I was in a shitty place then. Do you think it would be a good idea to post photos of negative moments as well as positive? ^ Clearly, no. I never wanted to take photos of shitty moments after that. What time zone are you in? I never memorized the format but it’s something with +8 in it. Would you ever post a picture of yourself crying on social media? No. ^Why or why not? Because I find that extremely personal/private. Do you like dark blue jeggings or light blue jeggings better? Light blue even if I don’t wear jeggings, I guess. Dark blue isn’t as trendy these days. What color is the rim of your whiteboard? I don’t even own a whiteboard. Do you have trouble staying organized? For some spaces, yes. I can’t ever keep my car clean, for one. Throughout college it’s kinda served as my second home so I’ve never been able to avoid having my stuff from home pile up in there instead lmao. What was the last thing you cried about? The Philippine Bar exam results got released today and there was a video that quickly went viral of a family finding out their daughter/sister passed before she knew, and the passer only found out because they were all whooping and screaming downstairs. When she realized what they were making noise for she fell to the ground and started crying and oh my god there is a lump in my throat right now just thinking about it again. Have you ever held a newborn baby? No, I’ve never been in a delivery room nor met a baby a day or two after they were born; there’s just lots of sanitary/hygiene stuff to worry about and I’m ok with getting out of the way for a few days to ensure their health. Do you know anyone who has twins? I know sets of twins, which I guess kind of means the same because it means I am at least remotely aware of their mom lolol. Would you rather look older or younger than your age? Younger. Where do you buy calendars from? I don’t. Do you shop at the dollar store often? That’d be impossible to have here because we don’t even use dollars. But we don’t have anything equivalent to like a peso store either, so no I don’t. What does your name rhyme with? Foreign. Are you following in the career path of any family members? Yep. I have two aunts who worked as journalists; one of those aunts also worked as a radio DJ at one point; my great-uncle was a historian, author, and a professor and dean of history; and I have too many lawyer relatives to count on one hand. Have you ever met anyone who talks like a robot? Yeah, some really bad reporters in some of my past classes. Name something unique about your town. We have an authentic Swiss restaurant. That’s genuinely the most random, unique thing I’ve seen come out of any towns lmfao because any restaurant that isn’t Chinese/Japanese/Italian/American/Mexican is just not a common concept here at all, much less Swiss. I haven’t tried it yet since it’s fine dining but hopefully soon. Who does all the chores in your home? My mom. She’s super particular about chores and likes things to be done her way. Every time we’ve tried to help her we just end up getting yelled at because as much as we try to imitate her, somehow we always do the chore wrong. Do you feel you missed out on a lot as a kid? I missed out on the emotional foundation/support, for sure. I had to figure all that out on my own. What is your best kept secret (or one big secret you have right now)? This blog that to this day, only my sister knows about. Do you have anyone you can tell your secrets to? Yes. ^If so, who? You. Hahahahaha Who was that best friend you ever had? This is in past tense, so my best best friend that I’ve since lost was Sofie. I’m sad we drifted apart but we both seem a lot happier today and that’s what matters. She was an important person in a certain period in my life so I don’t regret the friendship. Do people appreciate you and accept you for who you are? I feel this from them, so I guess they do. What color is your laptop? Silver. What class would you like to repeat over again just for fun? Bio 1 because it was easy and POLSC 180 because I learned so much.

What are five careers you think you'd be good at? Corporate lawyer, any job that requires a lot of spreadsheet-y and internal work really, PR, a consultant for something I’m interested in, historian. I tried to delete this question but I brought it back at the last second because now is so not the time anymore to still dodge my future career prospects lmao. Are you thriving in your life right now? I don’t think anyone is at the moment, and that’s okay. Who do you have moral support from? My girlfriend and close friends, mostly. Who encourages you to go after your dreams? Them, and sometimes my parents. Do you have people in your family who want you dead? That’s horrible lmao I wouldn’t think so? Are the police criminals in your town? Yes. List all the antiques you have in your room. I don’t have any. What Bratz doll resembles you the most? JADE. My homegirl through and through. Do you have a walk-in closet? No. What was the last thing you ate? I had a chocolate chip cookie. What would you do to save money for your wedding? Allot some money from my salary for it, lmao. Have you ever been manipulated, lied to, abused, or controlled? Yes, of course, yes, and sure. Are you against plagiarism? Of course. That’s literally the biggest no-no in journalism.

[queenangst]

Do you have any tips for people who want to study animation and be an animator?

hi, nonnie!

so it’s not really a secret that i’m an animation student, but i also want to put a disclaimer that this is my first year in college, and also my first time really learning to animate. 

for more information before i jump into it: i study an art & technology degree with a pathway in animation (with some game knowledge) at a public university. i will also say that animation at my program, because it is different from a private art school, i’m not technically in the animation pathway — it’s something that you learn foundations for the first three semesters, and apply to get into your desired pathway (animation or games) to focus. 

i have learned a LOT since i started school, though, so… let’s go! 

art school is not the only optioni thought i was going to go to art school, but i really couldn’t afford it without taking out a loan and putting myself in debt. please, please keep in mind that there are other options to learn animation - many public universities have related/similar programs, and i honestly wouldn’t go to art school if i couldn’t afford it. do your research.

there are going to be people who are better/know more than you. when i started off the year, i knew nothing about 3d animation or any part of the 3d animation pipeline. i’d never touched maya before, or any of the programs in my school lab. like me, there were kids who’d never done anything like this before (about ½ the class), and there were kids who’d been modelling and animating for years. there are kids who did animation programs in high school, or who had opportunities like having animation mentors. my school district did not.you’re going to feel behind. you’re going to look at these people with really cool projects, and who already know how to animate, and who do lots of crazy cool things. and you’re going to meet people whose relative is working in the animation industry. regardless of your skill level, there’s going to be someone who seems to be ahead of you. that’s okay. you’re learning. 

don’t commit right away (to one job/focus).this is a big one. when you go in to study animation for the first time, there are going to be a TON of different positions and interests. don’t focus on one thing and lose yourself in it. try everything. try modelling, texturing, rigging, animation, lighting and compositing. there are people i know who are already like “i want to be a character animator at blizzard” and that’s cool, and totally possible, but don’t limit yourself! you might have a knack for environment design, or maybe, like one of my professors you really want to be a lighter but after you get hired, your supervisor goes “you suck at lighting… but hey, you’re really good at grooming do hair and fur instead.” don’t do that!  there’s also a growing demand for generalists, which is something i think i might be interested in myself. being a cg generalist means you focus in one thing (ie lighting) but you have knowledge of other parts of animation as well. that means that when companies hire you, you might light a model, but then maybe they’re short a texturer, and then you can pop up and go “HEY i can texture!”

use your resources. please. once you get into college, oftentimes your school has stuff for you. that’s included in your tuition. use it! for me, there are whole courses on lynda and the linkedin e-learning thing. youtube. vimeo. books. find things that are available to you and squeeze every last drop out of it. 

get involved. this is the biggest takeaway from being in animation. you could be a great animator, you could be technically really, really good. but nothing matters if you don’t put yourself out there. look up local animation events. i recently went to one, and i spent an entire day listening to industry professionals such as mark simon, the storyboard artist for the walking dead. talk to people! ask them questions! i actually connected with an artist at airship syndicate who was at the event - she’s the daughter of an art teacher i went to studio with for years, and meeting her and talking to her was really nice. and i have her number. and if you have the chance to meet someone, talk to them. don’t be scared. this is your chance to get your foot in the door, or your chance to get advice from someone who’s actually made it. talk. to. them. 

join student organizations. my school has an animation guild chapter, as well as a game developer club and some other related orgs. JOIN THEM. pay the $30 or whatever membership fee. the animation guild at my school has given me, out of all the things that i’ve done, the most opportunities during the school year. i went to an amazon prime screening of Undone. a dreamworks skype call. discounted tickets for that industry event i mentioned earlier. and there is so much more to come. it’s 100% worth it.

try to make friends! this is something that i kind of struggled with, but it’s really important.having friends is going to be your lifeline. every monday you accidentally sit next to a new person in the animation lecture? introduce yourself. when you and two other people are the only freshmen in the labs at 11pm? there is no better bonding experience. having friends means you can 1) pester them for help 2) suffer together 3) get excited about each other’s work. these people are going to be your future co-workers. some might be your future bosses.��also make friends outside of your major. you need a break. 

making animation =/= watching animation. this is a big, big, big thing. don’t go into animation if you don’t think you can handle it. what you see on the screen is NOT the same as the work that gets put into it. when you’re an animator sometimes you’ll put in over a hundred hours a week. when you’re an animator you have to keep up with industry changes; every year the programs and tech change, and every year there is something new and different that you need to keep up with or else you’re out. animation is not easy. it’s up to you to put in the work that will make you successful: spend time honing your craft and talking to people. you will cry a lot. you will work your ass off. you will fail all the time. but you have to keep going because you love it. and if you can’t do that, don’t be an animator.

eat. sleep. take care. being an art student is not an excuse to not sleep. it’s not. period. you’re going to have friends who “haha i slept at 5am.” it’s not a competition, there is nothing for you to prove. with the rigor and the difficulty of being in animation you need to take care of yourself. set yourself a schedule every day - set aside time for you to eat THREE meals and sleep for at least 6 hours. treat those like work time. if you take care of yourself, eventually you’re going to look around at your peers who are struggling and suffering and you are going to be better off than them. because you had a meal at lunchtime. because you got more than two hours of sleep. you’re going to learn better, work better, live better. don’t skimp out. it’s really easy to forget, so i will set alarms/reminders for myself. i typically go to bed around 11pm-1am every night, so i usually get around 7 hours on better days. i eat. just don’t be dumb, okay? you don’t want to graduate and just fall apart because you worked yourself too hard and you didn’t sleep for four years. take care. 

i’m stopping this post here because it’s getting a little long but i still have so many experiences and thoughts i can share. so anon, if you’re reading this - feel free to come back and ask more questions!

[spacebrick3]

Evenfall University: Ring of Fire Part 1

So my own character of Mira Niemczyk is currently enrolled at @note-katha’s Evenfall University, and it seems that her adventures there need to be detailed! So without further ado, I present Mira’s adventures at Evenfall U!

Mira Niemczyk is brave. Foolishly, recklessly brave. She would die for her friends, and has only survived this long because she doesn’t have that many. Arrogant and stubborn, the type of person to whom warnings are no more than challenges and who very nearly launched her own satellite into orbit (it would have worked, too, if she hadn’t been ripped off with low-grade sulfur).

Mira Niemczyk also does not believe in magic. 

This is despite the fact that Mira attends one of the most prestigious magical universities in the country, and perhaps the world: Evenfall University, hidden deep within the forests of the northwest United States. This is also despite the fact that Evenfall only accepts those with proven magical talent or abilities. An impressive feat of cognitive dissonance.

She doesn’t quite remember whether or not she in fact applied to the university, or if she was even aware of its existence until she received her acceptance letter. The tuition was affordable, and a chance for her to leave behind the state of Texas to cooler weather and slightly less irritating inhabitants*. She has cause to regret her decision, and cause not to, and at present rests somewhere in the middle.

Currently, she is sitting in the middle of orientation, listening to the professor drone on about their ‘circles of magic’, which honestly looks like a bootleg version of the Olympic rings. Not the most original design. There’s lots of words, none of them meaning anything - orientations are supposed to be fun, aren’t they, getting to meet the clubs and students and teachers at the school. And instead she’s sitting here, falling asleep with her head in her hands.

“Any idea when this is going to be over?” she whispers to the girl next to her, black-haired with glasses that seem too big for her face.

“No, I - stop talking!” She glares at her, pushing those same glasses up on her nose. “I am trying to listen to the professor! And you should too,” she says in a huff.

Mira rolls her eyes, dropping further into lethargy. Is there really no better way of conveying information than a lecture? A video, maybe, that she could watch in the comfort of her own home - dorm, whatever. Something with better visuals than rings stolen from one Mr. de Coubertin and someone who didn’t speak like they were giving a TED talk. “Any questions?” they ask, staring out across the assembled crowd.

Silence. “You should have lots of questions,” the girl next to her mutters. “Seeing as how you refused to listen to a word of it.”

“Actually, yeah,” she tells her with a wink, standing and trusting in her brilliant red, completely-not-dyed hair to get their attention. Or the fact that no one else wants to say anything. “Magic…-“ she coughs, already coming down with a cold. “See, magic! Isn’t! Real!”

She didn’t have to scream it. It wasn’t even a question like had been asked for. But that wasn’t going to stop her, because she is right and she knows it. It doesn’t matter if they’ve put together fancy special effects to draw circles in the air, if what they’re telling her is no more than a collection of lies. 

College is supposed to be a place of learning, isn’t it? Not a place of-

The other girl drags her down, color flushing across her face. “Stop talking!” she hisses, glancing around. “I didn’t intend - you - you cannot do that!” she stammers. “Why would you do that?”

They’re laughing at her. People are laughing at her because she told them magic wasn’t real. “Because it fuckin’ isn’t. Don’t tell me you believe what they’re selling, uh-“ She jabs a finger at her, poking the lens of her glasses. “What’s your name?”

“Samantha Venera, Third Circle,” she recites as if reading it off from a roll. “But - oh, no. Did you have to say that? And now the students are all looking at us - and they’re laughing, why did you even choose to attend if you refuse to believe in magic-“ She tugs at her collar, a fancy outfit in blue and white that looks more suited to an old-timey ball than college orientation. Somebody’s looking to make a good first impression, she notes to herself.

“Not like I had anywhere else to go-“ 

Her voice rings out a little too loud, and she realizes it’s gotten quiet. “Please! Stop! talking!” Samantha whispers again in desperation, and this time she listens.

“The First Circle of Magic,” the professor is saying, voice low, “is extremely dangerous. I beg you, please do not look into it.” Doesn’t sound like you’re begging, she notes. More like you’re warning us. “You could lose your life by doing so. And for those who think this is a joke, that we are warning you away for our own personal gain-“ Her gaze seems to find Mira- “we’re not. Unfortunately, we’ve been warned by the APA to not disclose the stories, so I’m afraid we can’t provide more details.”

Muttering breaks out among the students. “Absolutely not suspicious at all,” she says, turning back to Samantha. Or turning to where she was, because she and her enormous glasses** have already vanished into the crowd. “…huh.”

Her roommates blur by, their names going in one ear and out the other. Harmony Washington, thespian who is already hogging the shower and slumping dramatically against the walls. Aishwarya Kamal, whose claim to the hardest name to spell is only challenged by Niemczyk, and Nitya Nair, who arrives in the dorm to sleep and that’s it.

She should get to know them, but she doesn’t want to. Just more people. That is, until Aishwarya drags her from her bed and her laptop, to the kitchen and three boxes of pizza. “Look - I didn’t know what you wanted,” she says, flipping the lids open, “so we’ve got pepperoni, cheese, and vegan. So…have some pizza!”

It’s free real estate food. “Why?” she asks through a mouthful of the pepperoni. Aishwarya’s even managed to drag Nitya in from her nigh-incessant soccer practices, though she doesn’t seem pleased by it. 

“Because we are going to be friends,” she says, barely managing to keep the smile from her voice as the last of the group sits down. “Right? I mean, we’re living in the same space for at least half a year. I’d like to have that be a good relationship - and everybody likes pizza. No better way to begin, right?”

“Where’d you get it?” Harmony asks, looking at her slice in suspicion. “Not sure I trust the pizza shops around here.”

“Local place, just-“ she gestures vaguely towards the south- “down that way. Can’t remember what it’s called. It’s no, uh, Pizza Port, but - doesn’t matter. I mean, this is mostly for you, Mira, more than anybody.”

“…what?”

She rubs the back of her neck, looking guilty. “We, ah, we all know each other. We went to the same school, actually, and were in the same astronomy club and everything. So we’ve been introduced to each other a long time ago. So this is more about getting to know you, Mira…Niemczyk-“ She mangles the pronunciation, Nee-em-zeek instead of Nehm-check- “and about you knowing us.”

“Not a great start for being included in the group, is it?” she asks, perhaps a little more harshly than she’d like. “Not if y’all know each other and I don’t.”

“Well, there’s only one way around that,” Aishwarya replies, cheery demeanor refusing to be put out, “and that’s if we get to know you! So - where are you from? What’s it like? Why’d you come here?”

All more personal questions than she’d like to answer right now. “Houston, Texas,” she starts with, became that’s the easiest place to. “We’ve lived there for a while, and in Texas my whole life. Until now.” She shoots a glance outside, more to avoid eye contact than anything else, and sees that it’s pouring rain. Maybe she should have noticed from the fact that Nitya’s currently dripping water onto the carpet, but ‘noticing things’’ has never been her strong point. “Is it always this rainy here?”

She shrugs, over by the sink as she pours herself another glass of water. “I think so? That’s the stereotype, at least, but I don’t know if it’s true.”

“I wonder if it’s magic?” Harmony says, standing and walking over to the window. “It’d be fitting, don’t you think? All those stories that they can’t even tell us-“ Lightning flashes, framing her in a halo of jagged light- “and the rain pours down outside, washing away any of the evidence. Footprints, paths, light - it’s all gone, swept away by the unending torrent. Maybe it’s how they keep their secrets-“

“Monologuing,” Nitya says without even looking up. “Because maybe it’s just the damn rain.”

“Alright, alright. I’m just saying. This is literally a magical university, why couldn’t they have magic rain? There’s water witches, air witches, nature witches like you, Aisha - they could do it.” With another faux-forlorn glance out the window, she goes back to her seat - nearly knocking over her drink in the process. “Maybe they just do it for fun. Two students falling in love, they turn on the rain for the dramatic argument that leaves both convinced the other one will never speak to them again-“

“About half - 170 out of 365 - days in Seattle had rain,” she replies, looking at her phone. “So either there are lot of people having their dramatic arguments and falling out of love, or it’s just the weather. Yes, I know there are that many people here,” she says, cutting off Harmony’s counter, “but I don’t think it’s magical rain.”

At least the conversation isn’t on her anymore. Or it wasn’t, until Aishwarya turns back to her and she curses herself for tempting fate with that statement. “So? Houston have less pointless arguments?”

“Not really.”

“Any of your friends going here, too, and you weren’t lucky enough to room with them?”

“No.”

“Do you know what you’re planning to major in?”

“Not sure.”

“What circle - what magic you have? Why did you come to Evenfall?”

“Second-“ though there’s no such thing- “and…“ There’s no good way to put it, so the best she can offer is a shrug and an “eh.” There are some things you don’t start out by telling people, especially not if you want to make friends. Why she came to a magical university while not believing in magic is one of them. “You?”

Though she’s clearly less than satisfied with Mira’s answers, politeness demands she answer. “Nature - I’m studying to be a doctor - have been almost all my life, from those little doctor’s kits to interning with a lab technician. Because I don’t think there’s anything more amazing than being able to save lives-“

“We’ve all heard the spiel, Aisha.”

“Mira hasn’t!” she says, not trying to deny that there is a spiel. “And what’s wrong with trying to convince people? There’s a shortage of doctors in the world, you know, and especially a shortage of magical doctors. What if Harmony there were to get hurt, then who would treat her? Sirens can’t just walk up to any hospital.”

“A siren?” Mira doesn’t even realize she’s asked it until it’s out of her mouth. “I thought - what?”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what? I thought this was a school for people with ‘magic’?” She hates being told she doesn’t know, and hates it even more when the other person is right.

“And those from the Nevermore,” Aishwarya explains. “Magical - well, they’re…people, but with magic…more imbued in them than something they can control. Sirens, for example, don’t have control - technically - Harmony?” she asks at last, finally admitting she’s lost.

She sits up from where she’s thrown herself dramatically into the chair. “Yes? I’m a siren. And I’m studying to be an actress. I mean, it’s kind of the route you go, because we’re good at the whole-“ she gestures to her throat- “voice thing. I could show you,” she says, with the eagerness of someone who almost certainly will whether you accede. 

“…sure,” says Mira.

“Alright, I think I’ve got it,” says Harmony, except it’s Mira’s voice. She has to press a hand to her throat to check that it’s not her speaking, because she can see Harmony’s mouth moving but hear her own words. “How is it? I can’t really tell if I’ve got it right-“

She nods hurriedly, just wanting her to stop. “Yes - yes, that’s my voice and I don’t like it.”

“You’re no fun,” she says again, switching back. “But, that’s what we sirens can do. It’s weird, you know, finding out you’re not wholly human. Like, I got a letter and it said “hey, you know all these people? Well, you’re not one of them. Come to Evenfall!” 

“And you did?”

The look she gets for that comment - a fairly innocent one, really, given the options - feels overdramatic. Like everything about Harmony, she supposes. “Um, yeah. What was I supposed to do, go to some normal college and pretend that I didn’t have gills? No, I don’t actually-“ she adds, seeing her glance- “but shut up.”

“And that’s the story,” Nitya says. “Now I really do have to go, since I think they’re running practice late. In the rain. Nice meeting you Mira, I suppose-“ it doesn’t sound like it- “but I do have to go.” She picks up the soccer ball from the corner, spinning it in her hands and spraying everybody else with water before pushing through the door. 

“That was abrupt,” Aishwarya says, frowning.

Harmony glances out the window, grimacing as a flash of lightning races across the sky. “Her fault for getting into sports,” she says, pulling out her tablet and flicking through it. “At least plays are inside, most of the time.”

The group dynamic has dissolved, and Mira takes that as her cue to leave. It’s a chance to get back to the normal world, a place where things like magical rain and sirens aren’t something she has to deal with. Not that anything at Evenfall can be called normal, not how the word is usually meant. Back to a point where she can pretend things are normal, then.

She’s always been good at that, pretending things are normal. It’s how she got here, and why she’ll stay. 

*this message paid for by the State of Washington

**much like Pluto and its moon Charon, Samantha’s lenses are large enough that the two of them should be considered a binary system rather than that of a single body

I’ll use my current tag list for this, since this will be just a short AU/story thing, but please let me know if you want to be added or removed! @lady-redshield-writes, @no-url-ideas-tho, @ratracechronicler, @ken-kenwrites, @ravenpuffwriter, @cirianne, @lonelylibrary @maxbeewriting, @endlesshourglass, @thebloodstainedquill,  @anip-ocs, @note-katha @dreamwishing, @incandescent-creativity, @fatal-blow, @danafaithwriting, @wri-tten, @writingwhithotchocolate, @katekyo-bitch-reborn, @klywrites and @dogwrites!

(and if you liked it, don’t forget to check out @note-katha‘s actual Evenfall University story and their stellar characters! We’ll be meeting them soon enough…)

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Spider-Man Life Story #1 Thoughts

Well...this was odd.

I have profoundly mixed feelings about this story.

That is owed to this comic being a collision of so many different things.

It is a period piece. But period piece that only half uses the period.

And I mean that on two levels.

It’s a period piece in the more general sense because it is set in the 1960s. But it is also a Spider-Man period piece because it uses 1960s Spider-Man continuity.

And it only half uses both in both cases.

Basically this issue was Chip Zdarsky’s Spider-Man AU fanfic that is a giant what if deviating from the Romita era...that is also set in the 1960s.

That is honestly the only way I could sum up this story. And by the looks of it things are going to get MORE complicated next issue because we move into the 1970s which implies each issue will be set in a different decade and this is confusing because if Spider-Man’s history played out in real time starting in 1962 then modern stories would only maybe be in the early 1980s.

Basically I guess this is more a general What If series that each issue will be talking up topical issues from each decade.

Which is seriously NOT how this mini was advertised to readers so that sucks hard.

But okay AS what it actually is trying to be...is it any good.

The answer is...kind of.

There is more good than bad.

Now you all know I do not like Zdarsky’s work on Spider-Man, so when I say there is more good than bad I’m not damning with faint praise.

On a general sense, the pacing is REALLY good. A lot of story happens in one issue. Granted it’s extra length so maybe that is why. The dialogue is perfectly fine, nothing rings untrue to the characters’ voices (except Gwen but we’ll get there). There is a respectable amount of introspection and exploration on Peter’s part and this is THE best Mark Bagley art in a very long time.

IIRC Mark Bagley once said that when he did the Ultimate Clone Saga and got to draw Richard Parker, he modelled him upon Gil Kane’s take on Peter Parker from the 1970s, and felt he got closer to that than he was trying to do in his 1990s work. You can very much feel that here now that he’s drawing Peter in literally the same setting that Kane drew him in.

Okay lets talk about other things that worked.

·         Flash’s characterization and Peter’s relationship with him. It felt very realistic in spite of not being how things played out in the original comics

·         Norman Osborn was very much in character in being devious and frightening

  What didn’t work.

·         Peter’s quick assumption of Norman’s amnesia. He kind of just presumes Norman has lost his memory on the basis of little evidence. Now granted his spider sense later corroborates this, but it’s still...kind of lame. Especially compared to the original story in ASM #40 wherein Peter figured Norman lost his memories because he was referencing an event from his past that he’d just finished relaying to Peter.

·         The blurb at the start of the issue says Peter was 15 when he got his powers in 1962. And then we cut to 1966 where Peter says that this happened 4 years ago. On the very next page he claims he has a year left of collage. Er...what? Maybe I’m out of the loop on the American college system (in the 1960s) but if Peter was 15 in 1962 and it’s 4 years later then he’d be 19. Collage lasts four years meaning Peter wouldn’t be graduating for another 2-3 years (depending upon how close he is to turning 20). He should be in his FIRST year of college,  1965-1966, and would be graduating in 1969, the school year beginning in 1968. WTF?

·         Gwen. Zdarsky has constructed a conundrum for himself here. This is the Romita era Gwen but with shades of Ditko Gwen but also shades of more modern revisionist versions of her and Emma Stone and also he’s now taking her in a MASSIVE deviation from the established Spider-Man history. It’s all a mess, and speaks to where Zdarsky’s shipper flag is planted btw.

·         Peter’s attitude to Flash at his leaving party. In the original story, ASM #47 Peter in a wonderful moment of maturity held no grudge against Flash and wished him well sincerely. There was no ‘triggering’ on his part.

·         The focus upon other superheroes like

·         Frankly the fact that this is not clearly either a What If deviation from established history or a true blue period piece using the established lore.

 And really that is THE big dilemma with this story. It’s not really committing to being one of those things or the other and is as a result kind of compromising both things.

 It’d be one thing if Spider-Man’s history was going in starkly different directions as a RESULT of Zdarsky using the historical setting, like if Peter was drafted for example.

But that isn’t what happens. Gwen finding out Peter is Spider-Man and Peter turning in Norman Osborn are things that could have happened in any contemporary What If issues (if What If was around back then).

And it’s not that these are uninteresting deviations to explore, but they feel undercooked because the book is also examining Peter’s introspection about joining up to fight in Vietnam. And THAT stuff is really interesting too, the discussion with Flash and Captain America serving as opposing arguments for Peter’s decision is REALLY good.

But again it feels undercooked because we’ve got this plot about Norman Osborn knowing Peter is Spider-Man brewing.

And the thing is I can’t decide if it’s a case of the story itself being at fault or the advertising for it being flawed.

Let’s put aside discussions about whether the story being Spider-Man’s history just presented in real time would’ve been better than this or not.

The fact is it WAS sold to readers that way so when you view it through that lens all the What If deviations seem weird and out of place, like distractions.

But hypothetically if this was just advertised as a What If mini ‘What if Peter turned in Norman Osborn and Gwen found out he was Spider-Man before she died’ then the focus upon Vietnam would’ve felt much the same.

But I don’t know if the series advertising EXACTLY what this mini seems to be would’ve mitigated this sensation from the reader. Or if the story itself is just really just two types of stories glued together.

I suspect it actually is the latter though for two big reasons.

The Vietnam plotline places a lot of focus upon Captain America and Iron Man. Their conflict is in fact the shocking cliffhanger of the entire issue. So you know...something that isn’t about Spider-Man himself. That felt more like Zdarsky trying to do Watchmen but in the Marvel universe. Which gets complicated because that opens up a whole can of worms for the relative realism of the MU, not least of which being how could the heroes ever allow things in the war to get to the point that it did.

The other reason is that the deviations from established history aren’t done the way of a traditional What If, wherein the in-universe history is identical up to a certain point then a single change sets off a new direction.

Here Zdarsky is just remixing various different elements from Romita Spider-Man to create an impression of that era and then deviating from the ‘general knowledge’ of that era.

Norman dropping Harry off at school cribs from ASM #39, Norman’s amnesia cribs from ASM #40, Flash’s party cribs from ASM #47, the Scorpion and Spider Slayer stuff treats ASM #20 and #25 as big parts of the past but the threat of Jameson’s  exposure cribs from Stern’s 1980s run. Norman wanting Peter as his heir cribs from Revenge of the Green Goblin in the 2000s.

But these elements, much like Spider-Man: Blue, are not remixed in a way that chronologically line up with how things happened. They’re all jumbled together so now Norman found out who Peter was (somehow?) but kept that in his back pocket to bring it up at Flash’s party and then announced he wanted Peter as his heir.

It’s all so...weird.

Look it isn’t an uninteresting what if but it’s also like...just a fanfic basically.

Not badly written fanfiction but it’s also like...what point is there to this really besides BEING Zdarsky’s fanfiction?

Another problem is that this story, along with not fully committing to the period piece aspect, simultaneously plays things with an intrusive degree of hindsight and imposes revisionism.

I’ve already spoken about this with Gwen but it’s also true with Harry and Norman’s relationship being cribbed from the Raimi movies the incredibly obvious ‘Norman will kill Gwen!!!!!!’ foreshadowing along with the ‘Professor Warren is a bad guy’ stuff; to say nothing of how Warren’s character design is inaccurate to the period.

That stuff imposes a present day hindsight of the Romita era whilst also overlays that with truisms brought about by adaptations being in the zeitgeist.

This applies to the Vietnam war stuff too. The book frames the war in a way that we look back upon it as opposed to framing it the way people in 1966 America probably actually viewed it. The final page is the biggest example of this.

Finally...didn’t we JUST see this from Zdarsky with his time travel arc in Spec?

Like wasn’t this a very similar idea. Spider-Man’s history but deviated because Norman Osborn’s identity is exposed differently and Peter and Gwen wind up as endgame?

Over all I can’t say that I disliked this. But nor can I say I was that thrilled with it. It’s not what we were promised and honestly...what we were promised sounded a lot more compelling. Moreover there are much better examples of period piece superhero stories out there.

·         Spider-Man Blue frames the early Romita issues the way they might’ve happened in the 1960s as they existed rather than Marvel universe 1960s

·         ASM Annual 1996 is DeFalco, Frenz and Romita Senior presenting an untold tale so good it could be downright mistaken as being MADE in the 1960s

·         Busieck’s seminal Untold Tales of Spider-Man series as a whole

·         The last 2 issues of Webspinners by DeFalco and Frenz which serve as a lost arc from their 1980s era

·         X-Men: Grand Design

I think this is something you just gotta pick up and taste for yourself, but again...just be aware this isn’t what it was advertised as.

[fredenglish]

Welcome once again, #FeatureFriday fans! Today, we're sitting down with SUNY Fredonia sophomore Dominic Magistro to discuss his English/Math double major, tabletop roleplaying games, and his plans for the future.

1. What do you think the most rewarding part of your time at SUNY Fredonia has been?

I think taking classes. Like, Fantasy Fiction with Dr. Simon was the most rewarding class that I took. We got to read a bunch of different stuff, from Harry Potter through Game of Thrones. It was a lot of fun, and we also talked about speculative fiction and its place in the literary canon, as well as how it affects the world at large today and how it can essentially dictate social policy in the future.

It was definitely different. Because a lot of my classes had not been discussion-based classes, prior to coming to SUNY Fredonia. A lot of my classes were just, ”you take a test on this.” Reading comprehension-based, essentially. And I think switching to a discussion-based [format] — especially now at the collegiate level, where I’m getting input from people who come from New York City, I’m getting input from people who have lived in Western New York their whole lives, I’m getting input from people of different ethnicities or different genders — is an extremely eye-opening experience.

2. What advice would you give to new or incoming SUNY Fredonia students?

I definitely think something that I’m struggling with right now is making sure that I have all of my graduation requirements within the four years. So I think one of the things, if you’re an incoming student, you should really look at what your major is and make a plan for your entire time in college, so that you can plan out where you’re going with everything. So you can measure yourself and see if you’re on track, if you’re going to have to take an extra semester, or if you’re going to have an extra semester to take more elective classes.

Another thing with living outside of that realm of your parents’ control for the first time is making sure that you have good hygiene. [Laughs] It’s a big hit to your mental health to have poor hygiene, and sometimes it’s really important to get out and do something to refresh. I rearrange my room maybe every month, every two months, so that I have something different to look at. Even being cooped up and working on my work, it’s still just… clean, and it’s neat, and it feels good.

3. Who is a professor that has had a powerful impact on you as a student?

Switching gears to my math major — just because — I really enjoy taking classes with Dr. Rogers right now, in the math department. He’s a really interesting guy. A little out there, but it’s not in any way that’s negative, it’s very nice. Because he also breaks things down and shows you where this thing came from, shows you how he got to this thing, and takes a very laid-back approach to it. It’s a “yeah, this is the quadratic equation and this is where it comes from,” kind of mood.

4. A lot of people see liberals arts and STEM as two completely separate worlds. Is this how you see it, and how did you end up pursuing both?

When I look at math, I don’t see it as numbers and equations, I see it as a language. Because when I look at something like X = 3, I’m looking at something that just says “X is three.” When I’m looking at that, I’m not seeing something completely different from English. It’s got a more strict interpretation, in math, but there’s still an interpretive aspect to it. You still have to apply yourself to figure out what it’s saying. That’s part of the reason why I really enjoy poetry, as well. Those two kinds of things, logicking and reasoning out things, are where I draw both [English and Math] in.

There’s also a huge connection in tabletop gaming, and board games in general, in that there are the statistics that you have to balance within the game, and there’s also the English in that you have to make the game interesting. You have to actually sell it in some way, you have to put an interesting story to the game, and you have to write a rulebook for the game. You have to have both aspects.

5. On the topic of tabletop games, you’re the president of the SUNY Fredonia D&D Fellowship club. How do you think being a part of that group has affected you as both a student and a leader?

Dungeons and Dragons is a storytelling game where you have one person — the Dungeon Master — who lays out a world for you. And the rest of the group — usually three to six players — interact within the world with characters they’ve made who have specific details and abilities. And the idea is that all of them come together to try and formulate this story, usually a high-fantasy story about, like, an epic group of ragtag heroes take on a big, evil wizard.

The English connection’s a little easier to see, right? I’m a firm believer that Dungeons and Dragons is a co-operative storytelling game, and I’ve said that so many times outside of this interview. So when I’m thinking of it, I want to say enough to give the players an aspect of what they’re doing and how they can go about what they’re doing and what’s around them, without telling them what they’re doing. When I’m planning a quest, I’ll draft out a few different interactions and map out how they go in my head, and they never quite go the same way [in real life]. You can plan thirty different interactions with this character, and the players will find a thirty-first.

As far as the math goes, that’s more on the fly. Combat isn’t my favorite part of Dungeons and Dragons, but I’ll still throw a monster in every now and then, and sometimes I’ll throw a monster or a group of monsters that’s a little too strong. So you have to dial it back, or maybe it’s too weak and you have to scale it up, and it’s not as simple as doubling its health points. You have to kind of play with it and see what’s working and what’s not working, and one thing I like about Dungeons and Dragons is that you’re forced to do it on that fly. It’s like a test. Every time I run I quest it’s a test of if I’m good at telling this story, if I’m good at balancing combat for these players, and I see it as a bit of practice for when I hit the workforce and I’m hopefully doing that in real life.

6. What would you like to do after leaving SUNY Fredonia?

I have a couple of hopeful career paths. I definitely don’t want to stop writing. I like to write poetry, so I probably will keep writing poetry, but that’s obviously not going to pay the bills. I’ll be designing board games as well, so getting a job with Wizards of the Coast (the makers of Dungeons and Dragons) would be really awesome, though I’m not sure what their hiring process is like at all. Independent development is always an option that I’ve been looking into, but it’s harder to do. One thing that I think I could get is working for a Fortune 500 company and working in data analysis.

7. What do you think is the most important thing that literature can teach us?

I think understanding. Like I said earlier in the interview, discussion with more people can kind of open you up to new ideas, and literature allows us to interact with people from all across the globe. [For example,] reading something like Albert Camus and getting that. Like, I’ve never met that guy! He died before I was born. But we have a lasting record of ideas that people have had before, and it allows us through discussion to come together and open ourselves up to new ideas.

[nerves-nebula]

no worries about rambling! There was a time period where I had a few more voices and (not saying it's the same) I miss mine too. I'm pretty sure we got like this out of loneliness too, we never really fit in growing up (to a more extreme way.

We spent majority of our time alone and it was common for us to spend days to weeks at school without saying more than a word or two. At one of the schools I was at after a year of bullying the next grade thought I was mute :/)

Goals idk they are hard to set? For me at least anyways. The other guy really wants us to go into animation or psychology, and like I know I'd enjoy that, but I also know we don't have the money. We weren't exactly helped into any post secondary and it would take a long time to get the money for it so it remains more a "what if" than a "one day" sort of thing.

I admittedly aim low and just want to survive, I don't really have goals beyond that (idk why). That stance will probably and maybe has left us with less opportunities though so ?? If we lived where we used to there was a really epic and not horribly expensive animation program we could have done but where we are now it's all either super expensive or not worth the money.

hmm other life goals is hard because we were forced to rely on ourselves a lot, including like for friends, family, parents, teachers, etc? We never found a group of people we fit into and we have trust issues so it's a challenge there lol (at best we were tolerated, but pretty much got bullied in the different schools and our home life was questionable). So like we've never thought too much about goals past "what will the next day bring and will we survive it".

Plus it is so much easier being friends with your head partner than it is to try and make friends IRL when it's practically impossible LMAO

However..

we both agree that it would be nice to move out from where we are now (ran away to some random place lol) but I take more of a stance of "it would be nice but idk" while my head partner is more like "I am filled with a deep and unending desire to reshape reality to get the hell out of here" so that might answer your question in a way??

(to add, we aren't in a terrible situation. Just renting a room from some creepy guy plus whatever the hell the local parts of the ""family"" has going on).

IDK if I have DID specifically but we're making it work. We do need to get more food soon though so if you have recs for easy things to make feel free to share haha (half joking, you don't have to!!)

THAT is actually completely fair. FUNFACT about me: I'm dead set on graphic design now, but before my mom forced me to apply to colleges, I desperately wanted to learn how to wrap cars. I had a graphic design internship and at one point they brought us to this local design company and they talked about all these specific niche jobs and ONE of these jobs was wrapping cars.

as in, like, applying decals and full body car wraps and shit. I really like the idea of learning a trade/skill like that and just doing THAT as a job instead of. this whole big conceptual graphic design stuff. Plus the course cost a couple thousand and compared to college that's. WELL. That's a fantastic price to be fully certified in a job!

downside would be working with Car People which isn't great cuz I'm trans and I PLAN to be visibly transgender for a long time so. that prolly wouldn't have been great.

but i didn't have a choice so im in DEBT now instead :) but its not really that bad. I like my college, it's a really good school and i love the professors. I just also like to COMPLAIN.

nobody thought I was mute when I joined high school but I would often go entire days without speaking hah. I also got bullied but didn't realize it was bullying until later hah.

and because I couldn't just make up friends in my mind, I instead focused on my characters becoming friends with each other. escapism and all that.

man idk about food. I just raided my college's food pantry for mac & cheese on the way out though so maybe that? Mac & cheese, various noodles are also pretty cheap, and so is soup. idk I kind of dont like food though (I have avoidant restrictive food intake disorder lol) so I mostly eat heavily processed or very bland food.

oh, another question! Which one of y'all is in charge most of the time? Is it a voice in your head situation, or can y'all actually switch who controls your body?

[internetremix]

Did any of you guys go to art college or art school? If so, do you have any advice for that? (Portfolio, applying, all that nonsense.)

Hi anon! Kristen here, this has been sitting in our askbox for a bit and now I finally have time to answer it. Warning this is very long, as are most things I type. I’m also gonna hit up other Artsy IR members to see if they have any thoughts.

I went to art college- Kendall College of Art and Design, starting back in 2008 and graduated in 2012. I went for traditional illustration because I wanted to do children’s books, though I also self-taught myself digital illustration and applied a lot of what I learned to said digital work. I have a Bachelor’s degree, yaaaay.First of all, if you really want to go into art as a career, there are some things you should consider. 10 years out from when I applied to art school, we’re living  in a different world. Art school is a lot of money and student loans are a monster I’ll be stuck battling for some time... and now-a-days, that stuff isn’t really necessary. There are a variety of online tutorials and courses you can take for free or for considerably cheaper. There are thousands of art communities, and with hard work and good networking you can make it just as far if not farther than someone with a degree. We’re very much in an age where being a self-made entrepreneur is considerably easier than it ever was before. So you need to throughly consider if the price tag is worth it to you.Art school does do a few things. A good school should have some solid foundational classes that give you the chance to experiment in everything and often force you to do so. If I hadn’t gone to art school, I probably wouldn’t have tried traditional watercolor work at all, and that’s what got me my first serious illustration job. Also a good school should give you access to professors who have been in your industry who can give you solid advice and also, gasp, connections.

Connections are a pretty vital thing, especially depending on what you want to go into. I’m not an expect on animation, but from what I know a lot of people who are currently working in the field got their start at California Institute of the Arts. Depending on where you are in the world, if you’re in a hotspot for whatever industry you want to go into, a big name school can be a major help for you. If you don’t really live in a place where that’s an option, i.e. you’re me and you live in the void  Michigan, you’re not paying for as many networking opportunities, so you may want to seriously consider if art school is worth it.

Art school also gives you the benefit to really focus on art hard if you play your cards right. I was able to go it full time due to grants and scholarships, which was intense but definitely pushed me through some major improvements. However, I knew other students who worked full time on top of being in school full time, and they didn’t get as much out of it. The big thing about art school, as is the case with any school, is you really only get what you put into it. Your professor can show you all the techniques in the world, but until you know what that technique feels like in your own hands, it’s useless.If you decide to go for a school, be sure to look into things like post-graduation hiring rates. Also ask current students there how they feel about the school- depending on the department at Kendall, people had very different things to say and they weren’t always positive. Thoroughly consider where you want to specialize, different schools will have different specialities even if they supposedly offer a bit of everything.

If you’re unsure on your speciality, that’s okay! Definitely still take foundational classes either online or perhaps at a community college. The more you experiment, the closer you will get to finding what you want, and that will make art school a lot more useful to you when you decide to enroll.

If you ever take any art class, ever, and it’s something you want to do for a career, take that shit seriously. I know I said up there “you get what you put into it” but I gotta say it again. My first year of art school I was going through a lot (not entirely my fault) but I also took several classes not terribly seriously because I was like “whatever man I don’t want to do this, this isn’t my major.” In retrospect I thoroughly regret not paying more attention in those classes, because those foundations would have helped a lot with struggles I had later on. If you want to do art as a career, you gotta REALLY want it and you gotta really focus.

I can’t really tell you if art school is right for you or not. I personally don’t regret my time there or my slightly scary debt, but I also benefitted from some grants to make my loans at least manageable and a number of other factors have gotten me to the point where I’m a full time freelance illustrator.If you decide to go for art school, check the portfolio requirements for every place you apply to. Different places will have different requirements. For me, I was required to have over half my work showing off my various foundational skills- still lifes are good, life drawing is good, oooh look ma I can use pastels AND I’ve got a tablet and can do digital stuff wowowowowow. I was told to try to keep anything cartoony/stylized down to a few pieces- unless you’ve received A TON of positive feedback about your personal style I wouldn’t use it too much because you’re probably still developing and that style’s gonna change A TON as you go through school.

Keep an eye on the acceptance rate at the school. If it’s EXTREMELY HIGH, that may show a lack of standards. This is actually bad because this means the school is basically letting people show up, taking their money, and then going “welp here’s your degree, good luck somehow getting a job in an EXTREMELY competitive field.”

Another thing you may want to ask is hey, how well does this school prepare you for marketing yourself once you get out of school. Most people I know who graduated from Kendall don’t have art jobs, and the primary reason for this is our teaching for self-marketing was really not great.

Whether you decide to go to art school or not, here’s some stuff you should really be working on if you want to go into art or get better at it:

FIGURE DRAWING plz. Please do figure drawing. Honestly, the more realistic you do with this, the better. “But Kristen I wanna do cartoons!” I get it, I do too. However, learning realistic anatomy actually benefits cartoony stuff a lot. Once you get a feel for how something actually works and is proportioned, it’s easier to exaggerate and adjust proportions without making it look weird. Draw a figure standing enough times and you’ll get a feel for how weight is positioned, and that means when you make those legs noodles they won’t look awkward. This website is a great tool for online figure drawing work for you to practice on your own, I highly recommend it! Or sit down and do it with a friend, it’s fun!“But Kristen, figure drawing is booooori-” Then once you’re done drawing the figure, make it a character. I actually have a lot of figure drawing and gestures that I turned into IR characters because I’m very cool.PRACTICE DIFFERENT BODY SHAPES BOYOPERSPECTIVE This one I am a lot worse at. But this has some good points on perspective. What I like to do is find a photo of a room or something and try to draw it to the best of my ability, then add my OCs to it. I LOATHE the perspective part but it’s good practice and usually at the end you have a nice day-in-the-life kinda feel to things, it’s like “wow my characters exist in a world instead of white space amazing.”Do some COLOR SWATCH CHALLENGES!

Also just... try everything. Even stuff you hate the first time. I hated watercolor when I first did it, but as I said before, that’s what I got my first job doing.

Above all else, make sure you draw every day. If you want to do art as a career or just want to get better at the hobby- the difference between someone who makes this thing a career and someone who doesn’t is the person who cares about it so much that they make time for art even when life is chaos around them.

I have other thoughts but this is long enough as is. Uh, thanks for coming to my TED Talk and I hope you find this useful, haha.-Kristen

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT PROBLEMS

My test was to think of intelligence as inborn is that people trying to measure it have concentrated on the aspects of economic inequality where the cause of poverty is the same as the root cause of variation in income is a sign that something is broken? At Yahoo, user-facing software was controlled by product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code. I'm not saying that if you let Henry Ford get rich, he'll hire you as a waiter at his next party. Somehow the idea of making really large amounts of money. When people come to you with a problem and you have to sound intellectual. All the hackers I know, managed to be mistaken. An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose deals. That was not, probably, how McCarthy thought of it as a personal insult when someone from the other team from scoring is considered to have played a perfect game.1 Right now, VCs often knowingly invest too much money at the series A stage. And if you weren't rich, you took the omnibus or walked.

Microsoft.2 Great hackers also generally insist on using open source software. In that case, stay on a main branch becomes more than a way to please other people. It's so cheap to start, this conflict goes away, because founders can start them younger, when it's rational to take more risk, and can start more startups total in their careers. When you reach the point where 90% of a group's output is created by 1% of its members, you lose big if something whether Viking raids, or central planning drags their productivity down to the average Frankish nobleman in 800, and report back to us. Art History 101.3 Hacker News and our application system.4 That way we can avoid applying rules and standards to intelligence that are really meant for wisdom. Whereas the independence of the townsmen allowed them to keep whatever wealth they created.5 These initial versions can be so pervasive that it takes a great effort to overcome it. Then you could see in the house, the herds, and the number one thing they have in common. The difference is that wise means one has a high average outcome.

Editorialists ask. Bottom-up programming suggests another way to convince investors to let you do it? If circumstances had been different, the people running Yahoo might have realized sooner how important search was.6 But that won't eliminate great variations in wealth would mean eliminating startups.7 When I heard this, I thought he was a complete idiot.8 You can see wealth—in buildings and streets, in the original sense, is something you write to try to figure something out. The more of your application you can push down into a language for writing that type of application, the more we'll see multiple companies doing the same thing ourselves.9 Which is precisely why we hear ever more about it.10 Society as a whole ends up poorer. But startups aren't like that. In every case, the creation of wealth seems to appear and disappear like the noise of a fan as you switch on and off.11

Central France in 1100, off still feudal. Or consider watches. You have to be nice to, you have two options: work at home, hackers can arrange things themselves so they can get the most done. And they think of it as normal to have a remedial character. The idea is basically that you sort search results not in order of how much money Yahoo would make from each link. It consists of some things that are good and some that are historical trends with immense momentum and others that are random accidents.12 The place to look for what I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a deep point here about the true nature of wisdom, just to make sure they're ok guys. I don't think there's any limit to the number of failures and yet leave you net ahead.13 Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Jackie McDonough for reading drafts of this.

One of the things pinned up on our bulletin board was an ad from IBM.14 Brandeis was a product of this period. But Apple created wealth, in the sense that the authors didn't know when they started exactly what they were trying to get people to start calling them portals instead of search engines. This isn't true in all fields. And this is the route to well-deserved obscurity. So it's not just fastidiousness that makes good hackers avoid nasty little problems is that you make what you measure.15 That's why Yahoo as a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered.

And of course if Microsoft is your model, you shouldn't be looking for, most of the time, perhaps most of the time, and runtime. You'd seem a barbarian if you behaved that way today. Starting in the tenth and eleventh centuries, petty nobles and former serfs banded together in towns that gradually became powerful enough to appropriate it.16 If Lenin walked around the offices of a company like Yahoo or Intel or Cisco, he'd think communism had won.17 Why?18 It's hard to predict what will; often something that seems interesting at first will bore you after a month. Understanding your users is part of what makes them good hackers: when something's broken, they need to get a work visa in the US, without an undergraduate degree—but tests like this will matter less and less.19

Though useful to present-day languages, if they'd had them. When you look at the history of stone tools, technology was already accelerating in the Mesolithic. We think of the core language semantics.20 The design paradox means they're choosing more or less a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of a subset of the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of hash tables where the keys are vectors of integers. Whereas if you're doing the kind of productivity that's measured in lines of code. But between the two. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley. Extraordinary devotion went into it, and most decent hackers are capable of that. As big a deal as the Industrial Revolution was well advanced.

Notes

Joshua Schachter tells me it was true that being part of wisdom. This is actually a computer. See, we can teach startups a lot like meaning.

We're only comparing YC startups, just that if colleges want to believe this much. If they're on the order of 10,000 sestertii for his freedom Dessau, Inscriptiones 7812. But you couldn't do the equivalent thing for founders, HR acquisitions are viewed by acquirers as more akin to hiring bonuses.

The point where things start to rise again. The most striking example I know of no Jews moving there, and that's much harder. I'm convinced there were about the origins of the things attributed to them.

If you ask parents why kids shouldn't swear, the police treat people more equitably. Please do not take the form of bad idea. In Boston the best day job, or at least should make what they do.

You have to do this right you'd have to deliver these sentences as if you'd invested at a pre-money valuation of the first phase of the most part and you can probably write a book about how things are different. The only people who get rich by creating wealth—university students, heirs, professors, politicians, and there are few who can say I need to fix once it's big, messy canvases that philistines see and say that's not art because it looks like stuff they've seen in the beginning. None at all. No, and there are no false negatives.

It tipped from being this boulder we had, we'd have understood why: If they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now very slow, but when people in return for something that conforms with their company made money from it, but they can't teach students how to value valuable things.

Everyone else was talking about art, they made, but investors can get done before that. There is a qualitative difference in investors' attitudes. I believe Lisp Machine Lisp was the least VC-like. So if you're attacked in this they're perfect.

By writing library functions. If you want as an example of computer security, and a little about how things are going well, but not in the early 90s when they buy some startups and not fundraising is a bridgehead. Oddly enough, even if they were to work than stay home with them in advance that you were expected to do good work and thereby earn the respect of their name, but that it's boring, we don't want to give them sufficient activation energy required to notice when it's their own interest.

On the other by adjusting the boundaries of what you really want, like warehouses. They can lead to distractions even more vice versa: the editor, which would be vulnerable both to attack the A P successfully defended itself by allowing the unionization of its identity. The real danger is that you'll have to resort to in order to pick the words we use the word wealth, seniority will become correspondingly more important.

It did not start to get going, and so don't deserve to keep their wings folded, as accurate to call those before a consortium of investors want to take action, go ahead. Gauss was supposedly asked this when comparing techniques for discouraging stupid comments instead.

I've learned about VC inattentiveness. The time it still seems to them unfair that things don't work the same thing. Actually he's no better or worse than close supervision by someone else. Mozilla is open-source but seems to have them soon.

107. The key to wasting time building it. IBM makes decent hardware. They seem to have a browser and get pushed down by new arrivals.

There will be interesting to 10,000 sestertii, for example. Some translators use calm instead of just Jews any more than others, and only one restaurant left on the East Coast VCs. There are circumstances where this is so new that it's no longer written in Lisp, they may introduce startups they like to fight.

We once put up with only a few percent from an eager investor, lest that set an impossibly high target when raising additional money. The US is the most successful founders is exaggerated now because it's a hip flask.

That's probably true of nationality and religion too. In practice it just feels like it if you have an edge over Silicon Valley, but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. You can get rich by creating wealth—that an eminent designer is any good at talking about why something isn't the last 150 years we're still only able to. It's true in fields that have it as a percentage of startups as they are in research departments.

I'm not saying it's impossible without a time before photography had a broader meaning.

This is a way to explain that the highest returns, like architecture and filmmaking, but we decided it would do for a startup could grow big in revenues without including the numbers from the success of their works are lost.

Many of these companies unless your last round of funding.

Garry Tan pointed out that taking time to come if they seem pointless. Considering yourself a scientist. If you want to sell, or to be very hard to do this are companies smart enough to guarantee good effects.

Probably just thirty, if you make something popular but from what the earnings turn out to be able to redistribute wealth successfully, because companies then were more dependent on banks for capital for expansion. The point of view anyway. Founders are often unknowns. Once again, that suits took over during a critical point in the sense of mission.

[frederator-studios]

Meet Gabe Janisz, creator of “Tyler & Co.”

Nostalgia time: I met Gabe in my second week at Frederator. I knew a Gabe was coming in to pitch, and when I went out to see if he’d arrived, I encountered a guy in pajama pants in our lobby. Now, animation is a lax industry in terms of work attire, but the notion of pitching a TV show in one’s PJs was beyond the reaches of my conception; I am too uncool. So my immediate thought was that he was a random dude who’d wandered in off the street - not that he was the guy pitching, let alone already a creator with us, of the GO! Cartoon “Tyler & Co.” No doubt he heard the question mark in my greeting of “Gaaabe?,” but he didn’t let on, because as I’ve mentioned, Gabe is cooler than me. He wears PJs to job interviews and then gets the job. He’s cooler than all of us. “Tyler & Co.” well demonstrates this, but here’s an interview with him for further proof. 

Walk us down memory lane. How did you decide to make cartoons?

I guess… I don’t know if I ever decided. I headed down this road because I used to make games a lot as a kid, because that’s what my older brother and dad do.

Whaaat what’d they work on?

My dad worked on the RoboCop 2 game. My brother still works in games; he was on “Where’s My Water,” that mobile game that blew up a couple years back. The thing with me making games was, I’d spend so long on the intro cinematics and character animations, that I’d run out of steam by the time I had to think about the actual mechanics and programming. So I finally decided to focus on the stuff I actually liked, and that interests me, and that’s story and character.

Where did that interest lead you?

Well, I grew up in Buttcrack, Colorado. There weren’t any real art programs or teachers who could show me the ropes, so I had to go it alone for a long time - not the best route. But I did draw a lot of comics. It wasn’t until I started visiting colleges that someone recommended life drawing, so I took a class on it at a local community college at the end of high school. That’s when my art started improving.

What’d you do after high school?

I went to SCAD for comics and animation. At first, I was in all of these kinda useless foundation classes. So I actually went to the chair, showed him my portfolio and he was like “Well, if you think you can handle it…” and exempted me from them. The next semester was one of the hardest, maybe the hardest, of my life. I was in classes that I wasn’t prepared for, especially this one storyboarding course. Maybe the foundation classes would have prepared me, maybe not - point is, I was totally unprepared to perform at the level expected, and felt unable to make the kind of stuff I was expected to make. I was up until 8am every night. I got really close to quitting animation altogether.

Wow, that’s hectic. What changed?

After that I was in a paper animation class that dragged me out of the pit. I made some good friends who helped me improve. And my paper animation professor liked me and actually wanted me to succeed. I got more confident in my abilities. I’d always seen things in my head that I couldn’t translate onto paper, and I finally could. And I did some cool things like studying abroad in France for a semester. That was amazing because comics there are considered one of the ‘Great Arts’—they seriously respect them. Instead of flimsy paper copies, everything was hardbound and gorgeous. They have a huge range of art styles, but they all feel so unashamed, whereas stuff made in the US feels like it’s constantly apologizing to you for being a comic. I’d been applying to CalArts every year since senior year of high school - it took 3 years, 3 applications before I got in. But I was really glad to have spent time at SCAD majoring in comics, because as much as I love animation, I get so pumped about comics. It was great to do both.

Then you entered the fabled gates of CalArts - and what’d you discover?

A lot of great friends. Who also happened to be great artists I could collaborate with on projects. I was in Character Animation, and because CalArts is so picky, you’re surrounded by people you can learn from, with all different tastes and ways of doing things.

Do you seek a studio gig - or how bout - what do you most want to do with your life?

Once online a stranger told me "your art is like an awkward hug" and I've kind of tried to run with that. If I can make at least one person feel a little less lonely, then I feel like I'm doing a good thing. I’d work at a studio if it were the right project, but mostly I want to be an independent comic maker and cartoonist. As long as I’ve got stuff in the pipeline, I’ll be happy. I was hospitalized a lot as a kid (and adult) and it kinda... broke me in a lotta ways, so it’s nice that me and Frederator found each other.

How did you come to pitch to the GO! Cartoons series?

Eric (Homan, our VP Development) came to CalArts to speak and my professor introduced us. He invited me to come by Frederator and check out the place. And then when I came by he was like, “You don’t have anything to pitch?” And I was like, “No, you said I was just checking out the place.” But I plugged in my flashdrive and just looked for the first thing that was around 5 minutes I could find and showed it to him. It was my first year CalArts film about a bunch of kids making bombs. And he liked it, so we started developing it, and it actually got all the way to the stage of pitching to Sony Animation. But the Sony people definitely couldn’t get behind the bombs stuff, but they liked me I guess. So they greenlit me but not the bombs. So Eric had me go back and make something new. I’d been doing stuff with Tyler for years so I pulled him out and figured out a new idea.

Where did the idea for Tyler come from?

Well in high school, I had Crohn’s disease, so I had the right to leave class whenever. I’d just up and go wander, hang out with the janitors. And one of them loved the Muppets a lot. He hung little pictures of them all over the school and I actually never noticed them until he mentioned it. But they were everywhere. So I started watching Sesame Street and got into that aesthetic, and admired the puppeteers. I’d also had a falling out with my high school friends, which was part of why I was wandering around so much. I started devoting more time to close friends in Canada that I’d met online.

Did you meet them through gaming?

Yeah, gaming and game message boards. It was a found family. I don’t have a large family, I don’t really have that foundation to fall back on. So finding kinship online was huge for me in a time of isolation. And watching a lot of the Muppets.

Did the Muppets inspire those puppet versions of Tyler and Lil G from the title cards?

Yeah - Tyler and Lil G are actual puppets.

(At this point Gabe pulls puppet Tyler and puppet Lil G from a mysterious red duffel bag that’s been on the floor. I didn’t know what it held, but I didn’t expect puppets. Ecstatic, I try Tyler on)

Puppets are in a lot of what I do, but not everything. I’ve made YouTube videos with them too - my roommate is really good at performing with them. So the characters were designed to look like puppets.

If Tyler & co. got a full series, would the puppets be in it?

Yeah, there'd be puppet cutaways. There’s an old Super Mario Bros show - it’s a really bad show, but funny - and they had intros and outros with live action actors playing Mario and Luigi on like a trash covered set. They’d do skits. So that makes me want to cap off Tyler episodes with puppet skits.

So Tyler came first, then how did the other characters come about - like Lil G?

Lil G is a younger, innocent guy that Tyler sees a lot of himself in. He feels like he has this chance to sculpt this younger dude, and kind of save him. He doesn’t want Lil G to screw up his life like he did.

How did Tyler screw up his life?

So Tyler used to be a child star in a show like Sesame Street. But his camera operators, the crew were super abusive to him, in order to get him to perform for the camera how they wanted. Pushed him into traffic, manipulated him, did really messed up stuff. They once strapped cursed swords onto his hands while he slept, and he involuntarily butchered a bunch of people while trying to find help. He got acquitted in trial and got a restraining order against them. But now he’s just trying to pick up the pieces, and his roommates are a huge part of that. The logline has been, “Tyler, why can’t you see that if you’ve got friends like these, you’ll be fine?”

Whose house is it that they’re living in? And what’s the dynamic among these roommates?

Rex’s - he inherited it from his grandma when she passed. Rex and Moe have a shared interest in ghost hunting. There’s another roommate, Rocko, who’s a retired boxing robot. There’s Marky Mouse, he hangs out, doesn’t hurt nobody. Lil G is a nuisance to them—he’s enamored with Tyler because Tyler’s the first person he’s met from out of state. So he associates Tyler with his dream of getting out of the town.

Where does this take place?

It’s set in the River Rouge area, by Detroit, Michigan. It’s where my dad grew up and he’s told me horror stories. Once in school, the river’s surface actually caught on fire. So they could see from the school windows that the river was in flames, burning oil on water. School wasn’t even cancelled. It’s a super heavily polluted river.

Have you ever visited there?

No, thank God.

So why does Tyler WANT to be Mayor of Cerealtown? Why is that of value?

Because they’re kinda losers, and that’s the kind of thing that’s important to them. These guys don’t really have jobs. The house was bequeathed to them. Moe does some tech repair, and he and Rex do freelance ghost hunting. Tyler’s big project is repairing a car, which’ll be his and Lil G’s way to get out of town. That’d be a big thrust of the show’s plot if it got a series.

Where do they want to go?

Anywhere else.

Let’s talk about the music in this, cause it’s great. How’d it come about?

All the music was done by Bo-en, and yeah, he did an awesome job. He composes music for games a lot, which is how I found him. He has this unique, glitchy style. I emailed him out of the blue, not even expecting a response. But he got back to me and immediately sent over a test composition. That was good because he was actually excited about the project. Overall, I went with everything that he chose.

Which cartoons inspire you most?

I’m more of an anime fan, usually. I’m a big Soul Eater fan - it’s stupid in the most creative ways, like I love the moon and sun up there gnashing their teeth and laughing when there’s a heavy emotional scene happening below them. FLCL and Gurren Lagann. Masaaki Yuasa is a big guy for a lot of people right now: his shows Kemonozume, Kaiba, and Tatami Galaxy inspire me, even if they all turn into trainwrecks by the end. That happens to a lot of stuff I like. My favorite scene in animation is from Kaiba; it has a lot of quick worldbuilding and weighty animation that i really like and tried to replicate in “Tyler” a bit. But I get a lot of inspiration from outside of animation too. Games, music.

Let’s hear about those influences, from games, comics, music, everything else?

One game is “Cave Story”, it’s incredible: it was made by a Japanese dude -- all by himself! I think that the more you can do on your own, the more your original soul and vision shine through. The character designs in the “Professor Layton” games are also pretty incredible, like retro anime with a european flair. Those two games are very different, but they both tell impactful stories! 

I was all about Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics for a long time; they ended recently. I probably steal a lot of how I draw slouchy characters from him. Hellboy is probably my favorite character design ever, for a lot of reasons: the asymmetry, his big arm, the sanded down horns... just looking at him tells a story, and it's crazy rare to see a character design get that thoughtful. I like Soul Eater for a lot of the same reasons. Just about my favorite written comic is King City by Brandon Graham, which is all over the place but manages to stay very human at its core. Osamu Tezuka, Naoki Urusawa, Katsuhiro Otomo, Inio Asano, Enrique Fernandez.... I get too pumped talking about comics!!

(Moonkiller, a dope comic and to-be short film)

My favorite bands are probably Gorillaz and Passion Pit, and i think a lot about telling stories that feel like their music feels. I guess it’s mostly about hanging onto the feeling that the music gives you and drawing with that, like translating a language? I do my best work when I can already *see* a show in my head before i draw it. When I made Bombadiers, my old Frederator pitch, i was thinking of this song Beck made for a videogame. They don't like, sync up perfect, but they still ~feel~ the same to me. Beck's composing work in films like Scott Pilgrim and Nacho Libre is really great! I’ve also been into The Postal Service recently because a lot of their music sounds... backwards, almost, and it’s interesting to me. Baths is another cool guy who I almost worked with on Tyler; his music can sound very otherworldly.

On a whole other note: why did they put snakes in the attic?

They put them up there to clear out another infestation. It might have been rats, might have been gorillas… I don’t remember. But they didn’t expect the snakes to breed so fast. They put the rats or gorillas up there too. So it’s really been a series of bad decisions.

Why snakes thoo?

Well once, I caught a baby rattlesnake with a plastic bottle in the Lodge. It wasn’t until I let it go that we realized it was a rattler - and the baby ones are actually the most lethal, because they can’t control how much venom they release when they bite.

What’s the Lodge?

Oh, so at CalArts, you’re assigned a cubicle. And there are two buildings with cubicles, the Palace and the Lodge. The Palace is a lot nicer, but the Lodge is more fun, fewer restrictions. My friend Justin and I - he was the board artist on “Tyler”, and a character designer on Rick and Morty - we built a shanty town out of cardboard boxes in the Lodge. It was our cardboard fortress. And there was one student who was in charge of keeping the other students in line, and he ordered us to take it down. And as we felt that was a violation of our liberties, we started a bulletin called the Lodge Gazette, which we posted around campus to air our grievances and report important Lodge news. I still write for it, when I can.

Tell us about your friendship with Jonni Phillips, which may be Frederator’s #1 most adorable friendship story?

I met Jonni through “Rachel” and offered to carpool with her to Frederator, and we became friends. We have a lot in common! We both share a sort of fatigue over mainstream animation in the west and east, and it was helpful for us to vent about these toxic animation communities, like, realizing that we're not going crazy, haha. I make these comics about us in hell together.

She also convinced me to pitch Grandpa 2.0 to Nickelodeon, which was it’s own whole can of worms. 

(Pls click that link for the Grandpa 2.0 experience, you will not regret it)

Okay, gonna need the whole Grandpa 2.0 story please, stat. 

So Jonni DOUBLE dares me to submit it to Nick’s shorts program because "They'll make anything!!" so I pretty much have to do it. I just submit the website along with the description, "I based this pitch off my own life in which i replaced my grandpa with a robot” and turned it in. First thing in the morning I get a response from them: "When can you come in and pitch the boards???" Boards!!! There were no boards!!! So Justin and I spent the weekend cranking out these rushed but actually pretty funny storyboards for an episode of Grandpa 2.0. But I was suuuper unhealthy at the time, literally bleeding to death (42% of the blood an adult male should've had) and I straight up blacked out and missed my pitch date. We rescheduled, which is cool, but now I’ve gotta fight the 'unreliable' reputation that the first meeting got me. So I start by rifling through flash drives for 10 minutes. The files are actually in the folder "Grandpa 2.0". The last place I'd ever look!! While I'm pitching I get to a segment Justin drew at such low opacity that it’s straight up invisible on the projector screen. And I just have to describe to them whats going on. "IMAGINE if you will, a high tech display screen..." and this other part where grandpa has a guitar solo, Justin copy pasted the animation, like, an obscene amount of times, so even if I held down on the keyboard it still took minutes to chew through them. He wanted me to make the guitar noises. After the pitch was over they were like, "What’s the emotional connection between the boys and grandpa?" and im just like "I dunno.. fear??" And then way later i got an email saying that they were "blown away by how professional the pitch was..." (and I'm like um were you guys in the same room??) "...but the content just wasn't right for Nickelodeon”. That part almost makes me think they actually noticed all the 9/11 jokes and stuff... So that’s how the pitch went, and for now Grandpa 2.0 sleeps, unless I can convince Eric to swing it by Netflix or something, hahaha.

What are you working on now?

I’ve always got a lot of projects going. An animated feature idea, Token Town. And Moonkiller, a comic I’ve been working on that I want to turn into a short. Paper Desperado is a game I’m making - my friend is coding it. We’re fans of the old Paper Mario games, so we’re trying to draw from those - not copying, more like figuring out how they made everything and trying to build off of those techniques. I’m also working on a radio play called Spookwood, about a drug that turns you into a ghost. It’s tough because I’m so used to describing stuff visually, and now I have to get everything across with just words.

When it turns you into a ghost, do you stay a ghost or turn back?

No, you stay a ghost.

So the drug kills you?

Yeah, it kills you, and then you’re a ghost.

Thus concludes our interview with Gabe Janisz! Thanks for taking the time Gabe, it’s always good talking with you. Sure we’ll be working together again in no time!

- Cooper

[it-is-i-zim]

I posted 779 times in 2021

9 posts created (1%)

770 posts reblogged (99%)

For every post I created, I reblogged 85.6 posts.

I added 18 tags in 2021

#craig the gatherer - 5 posts

#kraven the hunter - 5 posts

#marvel - 1 posts

#magneto - 1 posts

#x-men - 1 posts

#professor x should've done something - 1 posts

#man did fuck all but tell others to stop magneto - 1 posts

#and the brotherhood - 1 posts

#they were actually trying to do something about discrimination - 1 posts

#the spectacular spider-man - 1 posts

Longest Tag: 62 characters

#they were actually trying to do something about discrimination

My Top Posts in 2021

#5

This is the lamp Craig got for his wife, Susan. She hates it and during bookclub she tries to hide it because she finds her husband's taxidermy embarrassing. It's terrible and hardly ever in good taste.

1 notes • Posted 2021-05-28 15:30:32 GMT

#4

Where do you work

I am not legally obligated to answer that question. If you truly wish to know I will set up a court date with my fictional lawyer, Matt Murdock, and we can discuss it there and then. In other words, I finally have work coming up and I'm not going to tell you, because even though I hate John (that's not his actual name just to clarify), I do like my job and need to keep it if I want a roof over my head.

1 notes • Posted 2021-03-18 03:57:59 GMT

#3

This is Craig the Gatherer. He's the middle aged, conservative, middle class cousin of Kraven the Hunter who lives in the suburbs. He works a blue collar, 9-5 job to support his wife and 3 kids. Yes, he has airpods. He might take his oldest son hunting ONCE during a summer where he shot himself in the foot and it had to be amputated. He claims he lost it when he went to the African Savanna and a lion bit his foot off and he had to wrestle it. He then bought a taxidermy lion head on Amazon to feed into the lie. He also owns several cursed looking Taxidermy, like wolves with peacock feathers, a tortoise with it's shell split to look like beetle wings, and a lamp that's a raccoon in a dress that he got off of eBay as a gift to his wife on their anniversary.

3 notes • Posted 2021-05-28 15:26:12 GMT

#2

Anyway, so it's 11:25 at night and I can't sleep because my mother is slamming things around downstairs, cursing at my father, and calling him a scumbag. It's not fun and I can't wait for work tomorrow because at least I know I'm not physically at risk. Am I at a health risk? Most likely, considering that corporate only designates that customers wear their masks, which doesn't necessarily mean that they have to use them (ex: mask chin). Emotionally? I'm absolutely at risk when people start berating me when I already have such a low self esteem and possible depression and/or anxiety but I don't actually know because my mother would never let me go to the doctor unless it was for a vaccine. Even better, I know first hand how corrupt the American Healthcare System is and how little doctors actually care for their patients considering the fact it didn't sent any red flags to my doctor when my mother would butt in her 2 cents whenever I was ask a question about my emotional well being. Let's not forget about the fact that I possibly have undiagnosed autism and my mother simply refused to let me get a real diagnosis. And because I'm 19, a legal adult, not very many people will actually diagnose me because of that fact alone.

3 notes • Posted 2021-05-19 03:34:50 GMT

#1

Have you ever just wanted to break down and cry because you hear someone say "I think the world is pretty fantastic." Clearly, you haven't spent time in an abusive household while working retail during a pandemic, having to listen to your mother scream at you and threaten to beat the shit out of you because you're struggling to apply for college because of your executive disfunction and then have to listen to strangers scream at you over corporate decision about the fact that you have to wear a mask while in store, to come home and have to listen to your mother threaten to jump up and punch you because you haven't done anything with your life yet and she basically considers you to be a 50 year old living at home event though your 19. At this rate due to the sheer amount of stress your under, and the fact that your mother will scream at you or your father, who she cheated on and who you believed was your full brother is apparently your half brother and his father is your mother's old gym instructor, at anywhere between 5 in the morning to 7 in the morning and at this point it's considered amazing if you even get 4 hours of sleep.

3 notes • Posted 2021-05-19 02:55:32 GMT

Get your Tumblr 2021 Year in Review →

[theladyofdeath]

Castaway {ACOTAR/Chapter 3}

Word Count: 2,223

Summary:  A modern-day University AU, from the A Court of Thorns and Roses universe. All characters belong to Sarah J. Maas. The idea for this fanfic hailed from prompts sent in by Anonymous, and @queen-archeron. You can read previous chapters here.

Author’s Note: If you want to be tagged, you may ask in my ask box! If I’ve missed tagging you, it wasn’t intentional, I just didn’t see it, so feel free to ask again. Also, let me know what you think. :) P.S. Feyre is a big fan of Van Gogh. She loves the classics.

September 4 – the day I questioned everything

I was pissed, and confused, and worried….but he had a hold on me.

I had never been good at telling people no. I was a people pleaser, I wanted to be able to do it all. Especially when I cared about them.

Like my dad, for example.

My dad hadn’t worked in years. He relied on the rest of us to help make ends meet. For a while, after mom died, it was Nesta. She was the oldest. It was her duty.

But then, Nesta got so pissed off at dad for being a lazy ass (her words – although we all had our own lovely nickname for the bastard), and gave up. The day she turned eighteen, she was out of that little shithole town.

I was only thirteen.

Elain did her best, but she was always caught up in her designs. She worked hard for her money, and saved most of it for herself, to open her own business.

I encouraged her to do so. I could see how much she wanted it. Elain is a small, rare piece of beauty in the world. She deserved better than the shithole, too. The day she turned eighteen, she was headed to Velaris.

I was only fourteen.

It was up to me, after that. I felt it my responsibility, ignoring the fact that I was just a kid. I went to school, I went to work wherever I could find anyone that would pay me.

I couldn’t say no to him.

I hated him, most days, but I couldn’t say no to my father, because I loved him, despite everything.

There were only four people who ever had that hold on me: my dad, Elain, Nesta…..

And Tamlin.

 Love,

The girl who can’t say no

 The moment Feyre’s eyes opened from the early morning sun streaming through the curtains, memories from the night before flooded her mind.

Rhysand, the beautiful male, saving her from those two guys, members of Tamlin’s fraternity, who wanted to use her as a prop in whatever twisted game they had planned.

Tamlin, when he found Feyre and Rhysand alone by the steps of the front porch, utter rage consuming his intoxicated body. His fist hitting Rhysand’s eye – Feyre, trying to pull him back, trying to calm him down, trying not to be afraid.

Rhysand was innocent, though. She tried to tell Tamlin as much, but he wouldn’t listen, he was too far gone – from alcohol or rage, she wasn’t sure.

Rhysand didn’t seem surprised, though, and if he was, he hid it well. He simply rose to his feet, gave Tamlin an extremely vulgar gesture, and walked away.

After the incident, Tamlin had grabbed Feyre by the arm and brought her upstairs, locking them inside of his bedroom.

She watched him pace for a solid twenty minutes before he apologized. I shouldn’t have acted like that. I’m sorry. I thought he was hurting you. I’m sorry, Feyre, I’m so sorry.

I told you that he wasn’t hurting me, Feyre had replied, her voice hard, cold, distant. I told you that we were just talking. He saved me, actually.

Tamlin had halted, at that. Saved you?

Yes, Feyre rose to her feet and crossed her arms. Two of your loyal frat guys attempted to assault me.

Feyre didn’t know what she expected him to do, but laughing wasn’t at the top of her guessing list.

Must be some of the new recruits. Tamlin shook his head. They can get a little handsy.

Infuriated, Feyre began to grab her things.

Feyre. Tamlin spoke her name like a demand, but his hands were soft as they wrapped around her waist. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. The point is, they didn’t touch you, did they?

They grabbed my arm, but that’s it. Feyre shook her head. But that’s because Rhy-

Besides, Tamlin kissed her nose, softly, when you leave your dorm wearing something like this – he ran the tips of his fingers down the low neckline of her dress – you can’t blame a man for being unable to keep his distance.

Feyre wanted to say a thousand things. She wanted to curse, and demand that he hunts them down, and defends her honor. But all those thoughts disappeared the moment his lips pressed into hers, and her dress fell to the ground as she fell into his touch.

The thoughts didn’t resurface until morning came, when she looked at Tamlin lying bare beside her in his bed, the scent of beer still lingering on his breath.

Maybe it was the alcohol, Feyre thought. Maybe if he didn’t drink…..

She didn’t dare continue the thought as she climbed over her boyfriend, and began to redress herself. Once her dress was pulled back on, Tamlin stirred.

So much for trying to leave before he woke.

“Hey,” he smiled, then followed it with a groan.

“Good morning,” Feyre mumbled. “Headache?”

He sat up, slowly, and rubbed his eyes, then took Feyre in. “I’m sorry.”

“Do you even remember what for?”

He hesitated.

Feyre let out a humorless laugh before grabbing her shoes.

“Feyre.” He was out of bed, and standing before her in less than a second. Feyre tried to ignore the sight of him before her, bare and hard, but she couldn’t. “I do remember that I hurt you, that I made you mad, and I’m sorry. And, if the ache in my knuckles is any indication….”

“You punched a guy.”

“I do remember that,” he sighed, running a hand through his eye-length, golden hair. “Forgive me, and give me another chance. Please. I was drunk, and stupid.”

“Yes, you were.”

“Come back after class?”

She didn’t say yes right away, didn’t say anything. But, she couldn’t say no to him, to the man that she cared so deeply for. Especially when he was standing nude in front of her, with those big, pleading eyes.

“Yes.”

He smiled, and kissed her, gently. Feyre tried not to gag from the smell of his breath.

“I’ll see you later.” Feyre closed his door behind her before sneaking through the silent fraternity house.

She should have asked him for a ride, because the walk back to her dorm was humiliating.

She knew she looked horrendous, with her wrinkled dress, bare feet, messy hair, and smudged make up. Thank the mother it was only seven in the morning, and all she passed were joggers and professors on their way to work.

Unfortunately, the amount of college students who went for morning jogs was far too many.

It didn’t get any more comfortable once she reached her dorm.

She unlocked her door and threw it open. Mor, the early riser she was, was already showered and applying her makeup in the floor length mirror that was attached to the closet door.

“Good morning,” she smiled, observing Feyre from her reflection in the mirror.

“Good morning,” Feyre replied, as politely as she could.

“The walk of shame looks good on you.” Amren grinned, devilishly, from her bottom bunk.

Feyre scowled.

“We heard you had quite the night last night,” Mor said, the grin she had let out instantly vanishing.

Feyre opened her drawer and pulled out her make up remover wipes. “Does news travel that quickly?”

“Oh, no, don’t worry,” Amren continued, dully. “You’re not front page news. We heard from a friend, who your boyfriend happened to punch in the face.”

Feyre froze. “He’s your friend?”

“My brother,” Mor said. “He called from the car last night asking if Tamlin’s girlfriend, who he knew was our roommate, was named Feyre. And if she’d returned to the dorm yet. He wanted to be sure you were okay, for some reason. Then he told us a lovely little tale that ended with his face getting punched.”

Why would he even care?

Feyre’s heart sank into her stomach. “Oh.”

“Oh?” Amren spat. “That’s all you have to say?”

“It’s not my fault he got punched. Okay? None of this is my fault.” Although, there was a small voice in the back of her head telling her that it was.

 Elain knocked on the door that sat across the hall from her own. 21A.

When he didn’t answer, she knocked again.

As she was about to walk away, ready to give up, she heard the lock sliding out of the door, and let out a shaky breath.

Azriel appeared before her, shirtless, hair a mess, and wrapped in a thin, fuzzy blanket.

“Elain?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. “Hey. What are you doing here so early?”

Elain caught sight of the time in bulky, red letters on the microwave behind him, in the kitchen. 7:45 a.m.

“Sorry,” Elain blushed, then held up a small box, wrapped in a bow. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

“What’s this?” then, as if he realized what she had said, his eyes grew wide. “Wait – what?”

“No!” Elain shook her head, hectically. “Not because of Lucien! I, uh, I meant because I felt guilty.”

Those hazel eyes softened as he took the box she was holding out, and opened it. “Is this an apology muffin?”

“It is an apology muffin,” she confirmed. “I’m sorry.”

“You have no reason to apologize,” he smiled, gently. “I was acting like……I was out of line.”

“Is that Elain?”

Elain’s eyebrows rose from the deep voice that came from within the apartment.

“Cassian’s staying with me until he heals a bit,” Azriel explained. “And yes, he is a pain in the ass when he’s injured.”

Elain chuckled. “Well, I may as well come in and help you make breakfast, then.”

Azriel moved out of the doorway. “I was hoping you would.”

Cassian was lying on the pulled-out couch, his foot resting on a pillow. Elain gasped when she saw him, only because he was far more beat up than Azriel led on.

His face was bruised and battered, along with his arms.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Cassian grinned. “Nothing a little tender love and care can’t heal.” He winked at Az.

Azriel rolled his eyes, draping the blanket over the back of a kitchen chair.

Elain had seen Azriel without his shirt on before, but there was something intimate about the fact that he’d just rolled out of bed. Cassian had to clear his throat before she realized she was staring.

Azriel didn’t seem to notice. “So, how’d the date go?”

“Oh,” Elain sighed, opening the fridge and pulling out the carton of eggs. Azriel took them from her and motioned for her to sit down. “No, I’m helping you cook.”

“No, you are taking a seat and letting me make you breakfast.”

With a fond roll of her eyes, Elain sat.

“Are you avoiding the question?”

Yes. “No,” Elain began, reluctantly. “He’s perfect on paper. He’s handsome, he comes from a great family, he has a good job, he’s extremely nice….”

“But?”

“But,” Elain shook her head. “I don’t know. There wasn’t a spark.”

Elain had high standards, and she always had, but she was beginning to think she would never find someone who took away the shadows that hovered around her soul.

“Oh?” Azriel said from the stove, as he poured the scrambled eggs into the frying pan.

“We’re going out again on Saturday, though,” Elain continued. “Maybe it just takes time, you know?”

“Yeah,” Azriel replied, too quickly, and too happily. “Maybe.”

“Um, guys…..” Cassian began from the couch.

“I mean, this could be the guy I’m supposed to marry.”

“Maybe,” Azriel repeated, flipping the eggs one too many times.

“Uh, guys?”

“Do you think I set my standards too high?”

“What?” Azriel spun around. “No! Your standards should be high. In fact, I say raise them.”

“G-guys….”

“I just don’t want to walk away from something that could turn out to be amazing.”

Azriel nodded. “Whatever you decide, I…..fully support you.”

Elain smiled just as a wretch snapped them out of their personal discussion.

Cassian was sitting up, holding a flower pot over his lap that was sitting on the coffee table, hurling into it, profusely.

Elain instantly ran to him and began to hold back his shoulder length hair. “Az, get a cold rag?”

After turning off the burner, Azriel had a cabinet open, grabbing a washcloth.

He twirled when Elain gasped. On Cassian’s abdomen was a massive rash of little, raised bumps. “Uh, get him some clothes while you’re at it. We’re taking him to the hospital.”

 “Allergic reaction. Room 9.” Viviane handed Nesta a clipboard.

Nesta sighed. She wasn’t used to being on her feet so much, or working such long hours. She was exhausted.

But she woke right up when she made it to room 9.

“Elain?”

Her sister sat in one of the chairs, the other occupied by Azriel. And, lying on the cot….

“Ah, there’s my future wife.”

Nesta groaned.

“Nes?” Elain asked, looking back and forth between her and Cassian. “You two know each other?”

“No,” Nesta said, just as Cassian said, “Yes.”

“Will you be on our date tomorrow?” Cassian asked.

Nesta hadn’t forgotten that he’d told her that he would be waiting at the park for her on Thursday, no matter how hard she tried.

Ignoring his question, she handed him his visit summary. “You had an allergic reaction. We’re going to try a new medication, and we’ve also sent in a cream for your rash.”

He grinned. “Will you apply it for me, Nurse Nesta?”

Nesta just blinked, and looked to Elain. “The company you’ve surrounded yourself with concerns me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Will you still be at dinner on Friday?”

“Yes, I don’t work,” she said, handing Cassian her clipboard and a pen. “Sign stating that I gave you your summary.”

He did. “Wait, how do you two know each other?”

Nesta glanced at Elain, as her younger sister replied, “Nesta is my sister.”

“You’re Elain’s sister?” Cassian’s eyebrows practically shot into his hairline.

“What?” Nesta demanded. “Is that so hard to believe?”

“No, no,” Cassian said, under his breath. “Elain is just so sweet, and you’re so….”

Nesta’s eyes turned to daggers.

“- different,” Cassian finished.

Nesta stared at the injured man for longer than necessary. “If there are no more questions, you are free to go.”

“Thank you,” Azriel said, hauling Cassian to his feet.

Nesta was thankful he was fully clothed this time, in his baggy t-shirt and basketball shorts.

Elain gave her sister a hug, before grabbing Cassian’s papers from him so that he could operate his crutches.

“I’ll see you on our date tomorrow,” Cassian winked, before walking out of the room.

Elain gave her a curious glance.

Nesta simply shook her head. “I’ll call you tonight.”

Elain eyed her sister. “You better.”

Feyre was shocked that she made it to her nine-a.m. art class on time.

She was even more shocked when she walked into the classroom, and saw him.

He looked the same as he did the night before, only with a swollen eye surrounded in black, blue, and purple splotches.

She froze. I have to spend an entire semester with him? Seriously?

Feyre sat next to a girl on the other side of the room, who instantly cleared her throat. “Um, we have assigned seats.”

Sure enough, the name Clarrisa was taped to the easel in front of her. After a curse, Feyre rose to her feet and began her search.

As if fate or destiny or Satan himself had planned it out, she found her name directly next to his.

It wasn’t until Feyre threw her bag on the floor, and sat on her stool, that Rhysand faced her. His happy demeanor changed, his light-hearted smile becoming one of utter distaste. “Oh. Hello, Feyre, darling.”

She rolled her eyes.

He scoffed. “I’m not sure why I’m earning that reaction from you. Don’t you have something to say to me? Like….thank you? Or, I’m sorry my asshat of a boyfriend punched you in the face for no reason...?”

“There’s no need to act like a prick,” she snapped.

Rhysand held his hands up in surrender. “You were much more pleasant last night.”

“Find your seats, please,” the instructor came to the center of the front of the classroom. “I am Helion. You may call me by that name, I am not a fan of official titles. I know what you’re thinking – why am I in college with an assigned seat? Solid question.” A soft, comfortable round of chuckles surrounded Feyre. “I’ve arranged you with a partner. This is your first official assignment: paint one another doing ten different activities. College is the time to meet people, and discover new things. Get to know your partner, and it will show in your art. Get together outside of class over the next few weeks. This project is due on the first of November.”

Feyre didn’t have to look at Rhysand to know that he was grinning like a fool.

Feyre, on the other hand, felt like she was going to be sick.

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