#I need my stuff to look as good as whoever did the background concept art for sb

[bamsara]

I recently met Emese Szigetvári (main FNAF artist) and Laura Rogers (art for Security Breach) at a con going on around where I live, I decided to tell them about Bam, they said they liked the art and appreciated dedicated fans and one of them called Eclipse "spooky candle"

Ayoo??? AYO?? Holy shit

What I wouldn't give to be able to have clean artwork like them, that and Sabine Belofsky's stuff since the vibes are immaculte. But whoag maybe one day I'll meet them at MoMocon or Kamicon if I'm lucky, 'spooky candle' is a new one I think lmao

[feelingofcontent]

DNP Rewatch: FIRST LONDON APARTMENT TOUR!!1!

Date video was published: 04/05/2013 (X)

DNP Main Channel Rewatch: 175

Apartment tour! This was another of the videos people voted on at the end of  DAN IS ON FIRE. This is going to be a long one.

0:02 - Dan does not look so thrilled about this, haha. And sarcastic Dan is out in full force.

0:25 - “I like watching other YouTubers doing it.” Still true!

0:50 - “but lonelier, because no one’s helping me.” 🙁 Dan’s filming this while Phil is still in Florida with his family.

0:58 - SO MANY stairs

1:08 - why do they have multiple rubber ducks!? lol. Including the huge one they still have in PINOF10.

1:20 - I love that he’s shooting from the same angle that Phil did in  TOILET TAG (although that’s probably the only option in that tiny room)

1:27 - at least Dan offers a bit more explanation for the poster than Phil did!

1:46 - ahhhhh, so messy! I don’t deal well with mess like that.

2:04 - everyone needs a good place to just lay down on the floor. (Also, John Green book in the background!)

2:19 - Bryony painted them that fish painting when they first moved to London! (*1)

2:20 - future gaming room! The little chest of drawers was what was originally in Phil’s room before he got the new dresser, first in INNUENDO BINGO 2!

2:22 - lol at the giraffe sex image on the computer for some reason

2:24 - it’s Dan’s “paint me like a French girl” pose 😂

2:25 - that’s not sooo messy

2:31 - Little items in the lounge: Hulk & Iron Man pictures (now in a new home!); Japanese robot poster (this eventually ends up in Phil’s bedroom after they get the pixel mirror); Muse poster from the first concert they went to together in 2010. (I’m sure this is in the forever home somewhere and 😭.); True Blood drinks (Dan bought them these back in October 2011) and little robot figure; Colored string balls (*2), Pacman ghost, Mario cube; Tetris lamp; Pacman ghost lamp; Supernote trophy (for winning that contest)

2:46 - The start of the sofa crease!

2:56 - so many DVDs! I like that they’re alphabetized.

2:58 - the little Calcifer from Howl’s Moving Castle. (Also, foreshadowing of later gas leak...yikes.)

3:15 - that glass door really is a weird choice from whoever designed that apartment. What purpose could it possibly serve?

3:27 - Phil’s not the only one sneaking cereal, apparently 😊

3:38 - oh this bit; sure Dan, totally believable. (There’s that Lester family photo (*3) on the dresser though.)

3:47 - Dan piano playing is my favorite

3:51 - he’s rearranged and got a larger version of that one wirrow art since the last time he filmed his bedroom in Human Interaction.

3:52 - Some of Dan’s books - he must like The Edge Chronicles series (*4)

3:54 - Dan’s childhood bear (*5)! 🥺 And I kinda love that lightbulb lamp. But I hate the teddy bear lamp for some reason.

3:55 - that laser pod must have been the red lights I was confused about in List of reasons why I'm an awful Human Being

3:56 - the butt chair (*6)! Also, obsessed with him having the Tonberry, “hell demon,” and Pickachu plushies there together. 😭

3:57 - More bedroom items: love the amber lamp; more wirrow art (*7); seaweed tree; cologne (*8); the stylophone (from Phil); dice; Guild Wars concept art; the secret box! (*9)

4:13 - the parallel with the zoom-in on the butt chair to Why Dan had to call an Ambulance. Too much.

4:16 - that is a lot of Guild Wars stuff

4:26 - he’s also gotten new/nicer bedroom furniture that we hadn’t seen yet!

4:39 - “not much of that going on at the moment in here.” 👀👀 I am deceased. Phil is away in Florida, so...

4:53 - we really didn’t need to know, lol

5:30 - yeah, I can’t imagine trying to film in uni halls, but Phil did it a lot!

I am obsessed with how many of the things from this video we’ve already seen that they still have in the forever home. 🥺 I’ve numbered them above with (*#) and matched the numbers below.

[gb-patch]

Ask Answers (February 22nd, 2021)

Hello! Here’s another collection of anon ask answers all put together in one big post.

This might be strange considering how upbeat yall are about the fandoms for your games in general, but is there any particular trope or ship you WOULDN'T want us writing/drawing/etc. in relation to your stuff? (IE, any canon you don't want us 'overwriting' or something like that?)

Of course we would want the fan content people make to not be racist, sexist, homophobic, bigoted, harmful, etc. But in terms of generally doing non-canon pairings or adding in headcanons or stuff, we really don’t mind that. People are welcome to have fun and explore their own ideas.

for the 1.2 Android update was it meant to download as a  separate app? I really want to keep my previous save files but they don't show up (also thank u for the updates I'm really excited to get back into the game!!)

We had to change the name of the file and unfortunately for some phones that meant it’s treated as a brand new game. I’m sorry your saves didn’t transfer over to the new version. You can try to look up your specific phone and see if there’s a way to access save files for games on your device and then transfer those saves over to the new build manually. It may or may not be possible.

I'm having some trouble figuring out how to get the update from Itichio without losing my save files? Is it the same game or a folder I can put in the properties? Sorry if this question is not worded well or if this isn't the avenue you'd want to take technical questions on

Are you using Android? If so, the above answer may apply to you. If you’re on PC or Mac, the save files will automatically still be included.

Hey. I really loved playing our life. It was a fun experience and I never thought I would like it this much. I do have a question, I am currently replaying the game and I am choosing choices I never chose at first. In step 2 during the road trip arc, I decided to ask Cove about what he liked to see on people. One of his response was anklets and black eyes. My MC have just happens to have black eyes. Do Cove say black eyes cuz my mc have it or it was just a coincidently programmed into the game?

He uses your eye color intentionally! If you changed your eye color he’d change what he said.

Will step 4 have 10 moments like steps 1-3? 

Step 4 is only an epilogue. It plays like the openings/endings of the earlier Steps where it’s a bunch of scenes all in a row, there aren’t any individual Moments.

hi! who was/were the artist(s) for our life? 

&

who is the artist for Our Life: Beginning and Always?

Main Sprite and CG Artist: Addrossi

Main Background Artist: Vui Huynh

Main Interface Artist: Winter Slice

Other artists who helped out can be seen in the credits of the game.

In the new ol, there are two main love interests... Would it be possible to pair them together or is that weird? 

You can’t stay single and pair them together. If we are going to add all the extra content to have a route where the two LIs get together, it’d be a full poly route where them and the MC were all dating. And that’s not a for sure option yet because it’d add a lot of extra complications. But either way, in OL the relationships all gotta be about the MC, haha.

In OL2, there will be extra LIs in form of DLCs? Like Dexter and Baxter. 

Maybe! We’ll see how it goes.

Since Cove will have 2 diff body types in s4, will the storyline and dialogs reflect this? Or all of it will be the same? Btw love the game and sorry for bad english. Hope this doesn't sound rude 😅 

Some descriptions and pieces of dialog will change, but it won’t impact the story really. And you don’t need to apologize! It’s all good.

Will you ever release the transparent sprites of the Our Life characters? 

Probably not, I’m afraid. They’ve got a lot of pieces and it’d just be kind of hard to deal with, aha.

Something I was curious about, what was your inspiration for making a game with so much customization?

Initially, the idea was just about having a romance where you actually grew up with the LI. But it was pretty stressful to try deciding how fast the relationship would progress with it taking place over such a long period of time and with no real storyline carrying it. People might not wanna play a game where the characters don’t get along as kids, but other people might not bother with a game where kids immediately liked each other. So the obvious answer came, just let the player pick themselves how it goes. From there we simply continued to add more flexibly with the MC due to the same thought process of wanting to make sure people were onboard with how their life was going.

What made you decide to change the artstyle for ol 2 so much? I of course respect all your decisions and will buy the shit out of everything related to ol 2, but i love the original style and i m honestly not a fan of the styles shown on patreon, despite me liking the painterly style in general. (I don t mind the style being changed, just that the examples shown so far all feel like there s something wrong with them.) 

We’ve always used different art styles for each of our projects. They all have distinct looks from each other. It’s just nice to do something new. I’m glad you really like how the first game looks, though. And those samples were only general concepts, rather than the exact options being decided between. We wanted to see reactions to different options. The art style we’re going with won’t be exactly like those, though I personally like all of them. I think players are gonna enjoy the style Our Life: Now & Forever when it’s revealed.

Hey! Is it ok to ask what gender ourlife2 protagonist will be and if we'll be given the same opportunity to customize an MC? Totally understand if you're keeping this under wraps for now if u don't wanna say! 

OL2 will have the same type of MC customization as OL1, but even more refined! So their gender will be up to you.

Hi! I happened upon Our Life on Steam by pure chance. It is such a great game, I am super excited about the DLC, and I just want you all to know that you are awesome! :D I have a question, and I'm sorry if it's been asked before. Do you have plans of making more games similar to Our Life, with customizable player character? The customizable player character was probably the one thing I personally have been desperate for in romance VNs. So glad there finally is one and would love to see more.

Thank you! And yep, we do have plans for more games like Our Life, most notably is another game in the franchise- Our Life: Now & Forever. We’ll also likely have other, non-OL, games with customizable MCs, though we may still have some games with set MCs in the future as well.

On the patreon dlc just curious but is it possible to play it without actually sleeping together/getting the nsfw content? I just want to spend more time with Cove 

Yeah, you can still choose not to go that far. Though the event is shorter if you pass on the 18+ stuff.

At the beginning of Step 2, did Cove end up accidentally falling asleep in your bed? Or did he fall asleep on the floor? 

He fell asleep sitting on the floor with his body/head leaning against the side of the bed.

This may seem like a weird question, but what exactly is the difference between "direct" and "relaxed" on the comfort scale?

Direct is blunter and more teasing, relaxed is lighthearted and goes with the flow.

can the MC have tattoos in step 3? 

Not in Step 3, but you can in Step 4.

how would Cove react if he visited somewhere like North Carolina in winter where it can get in the 20s(F) at night sometimes? 

He would be shocked and unprepared for what serious coldness is really like, haha. The poor beach baby would wanna go home.

Hello! I just joined the PATREON!! It’s amazing! I love your games! I have a question, approximately how much after will the nsfw be out? After or before the dlc 3 and step four? Sorry my English isn’t the best!❤️❤️❤️ 

Thanks so much! The NSFW DLC will be out after the Step 3 DLC but before Step 4. And you don’t need to apologize for that ^^.

This might be obvious but, will step 4 have dlcs? Also, where will the nsfw dlc happen? Won't bother me at all if it s in in our or his house but i do think it d be moderately funny 

Step 4 will have the Cove Wedding DLC and the Derek and Baxter romance DLCs each add a lot of new content to Step 4, though they’re also partially set in Step 2 and Step 3 respectively. The NSFW DLC happens in Cove’s room.

I keep wondering what would've happened if Mr. Holden met Lizzie first instead of the MC. I can't see that turning out well somehow lol. 

It wouldn’t have made a difference. He met the MC’s parents first and they told him about their two kids. He wanted the MC specifically to be Cove’s friend because the two were the same age.

Even though we have a way to go I'm really excited for OL 2! I was curious though, is the next main character going to be adopted again? I thought it was really clever to make the first main character adopted so when players are customizing,  they can make them look how ever they like without worrying about pesky genetics. Just wondering! 

The OL2 MC is not adopted. We wanted to go for a new dynamic. Instead their parents are their biological single mother who is partially customizable and an off-screen sperm donor father. So the mom will look generally like the MC and any other traits not from her can be assumed to come from whoever the father was.

—– —– —–

Thank you so much for all the asks ^^

FAQ   If you prefer to just see the main posts without all the asks/reblogs, feel free to follow our side account instead: GB Patch Updates Blog

[mysticsparklewings]

Holiday Card Project 2019

Oh would you look at that; I’m participating in the deviantArt Holiday Card Project again this year! Just like last year, my crafty efforts aren’t really done proper justice by scans or photos, so I’ll be uploading a short video...somewhere (probably Instagram but we’ll see) and then link back to it to hopefully show it off a bit more.   It’s funny though, I’d almost forgotten about HCP until I got the notification that it had opened for this year. And yet I was so concerned about having it in the mail on time that I got this one done pretty much in one day. I think last year's card took me closer to 2 days and I was pushing my luck that it would get there in time.   My process for this year went as follows: I browsed around on Pinterest for a while, as I hadn’t the foggiest idea what to do. During that process, I latched onto a concept I saw a few times; Christmas lights and the phrase “merry and bright,” and so I went with that. Already I had the idea of the lights being across the top of the card, with a real piece of thread (which would later be changed to wire as the idea occurred to me while I was digging for some other supplies) connecting them. After some thought, I decided I wanted to add some cotton to the bottom to add a little more pizzazz. Because if last year’s HCP taught me anything, it’s that I like to go big or go home for the occasion. And I knew where I could get some too; the fields next to the house have already been picked for this year, but there was still a good amount of cotton leftover on the stalks near the edges. Let me tell you, I have a newfound appreciation for whoever invented a mechanical way to take the seeds out of cotton, because gosh darn it if that process is not far more tiresome than you’d think! I think I finally did manage to get them all out, but now I know why it’s probably just easier to buy cotton or polyester fiberfill. XD Anyway. With my mind made up and a handle full of cotton at the ready, I started on the actual card part. In the past, for my card needs I’ve usually used some of the pre-folded & cut cards my mom has on hand, but this time I didn’t feel like bothering her about it. So instead I grabbed a piece of my gold-shimmer cardstock and cut it down so that once I folded it I’d have a 5” x 7” card. (As that’s what Google told me was a fairly common size for greeting cards and would fit comfortably in most standard envelopes.) Then I used my trick from my book-making endeavors of using the edge of scissors to “score” the folding line on one side of the card to make that process easier. In trying to make some stamps I didn’t end up using magically appear from whoever they were hiding, I found some metallic gold stripey paper in my stash and had the idea to cover the outside of the card with it, maybe. At the time I was a little bit skeptical if I wanted to do that, but I pulled it out and set it on the desk anyway so I could have the option if I wanted it. And as you can see, I ended up deciding to go for it, though at this point in the process I simply measured out and cut it as needed; I wouldn’t attach it until later. Then I paused and used the scrap cardstock pieces to test some pens and such, only to find I was only minimally (at best) interested in using any of them. I had some ideas to incorporate certain things but they were things I couldn’t really try out until I had more of the card finished, and some things I couldn’t figure out solutions for until then either. So I swatched out some marker colors and started practicing on some print outs of the Christmas light shape—which is fortunately had the foresight to do the said printing out before I got into the thick of everything else—only to find that I just really was not happy with the blends I was getting.  I think the main problem is that I just didn’t have certain colors I needed, but the glowing/fade effect I was trying to get was also totally new territory for me and I seemed to only get worse the more times I tried it.   In the end, I picked out a “base” shade for each Christmas light color from the markers and then selected a dark, a “true color” and a highlight from my Prismacolor pencils to do the shading instead. There were still challenges to be had, but this system worked a lot better for me. Benefits of being a mixed media artist: if one medium just isn’t doing it for you, you can bring in others to level the playing field   The lights then got bright shine spots courtesy of my white Gelly roll pen and their little silver bits I did with a silver Art Philosophy watercolor. Even though I was already anticipating the silver getting kind of lost against the gold in the background. I had a vision and I was sticking to it. In addition to that vision, once the lights were safe to handle I glued them to a piece of foam and then left them alone to dry, figuring it would be easier and simpler to cut them out if I only had to do it once. As such, the edges aren’t super smooth, but otherwise, I think that was the right call. While they dried, I then attached the gold-stripe paper to the card surface and started thinking about where and how I would implement the text parts of the card. (And at some point I took a break to figure out the full inside and outside please, as originally all I was going on was “merry and bright,” though I don’t remember when exactly in the process that was.) Here, I had the idea that black paper might look cool. The only black paper I have is a pad of Crayola stuff that I think is actually for practicing calligraphy or hand lettering or something? My original plan was to take one of the pages out and use the blank back, but as I filled through I saw some of the cut out frame-y things and took a look to see if any of them would work for what I wanted/needed, and you can see the two I picked out. Though the one on the inside of the card had only the black and gray/silver originally; the colors I added by hand with my gel pens since it felt like it really needed it. The black paper on the inside also needed a little more attention than the one on the outside. I didn’t cut either of them perfectly straight, but there were a lot more distracting elements that were going to be on the outside, so it was far less noticeable there. On the inside, I ended up going around the edge with some gold and white washi tape that when well with the outside of the card to camouflage the uneven edges. By the time I had all the various papers properly attached to each other and the top edge inside of the card decorated with a strip of glitter tape and a repeating stamp of Christmas lights to tie in with the outside, I felt the lights were dry enough to cut out, so I did. And that meant that the /real/ card assembly could begin. I punched little holes in the tops of the lights for the wire I’d add in later and then fiddled with their placement for a bit before gluing them down...which I then I had to wait for about twenty minutes before I could proceed if I wanted things to dry mostly flat.   So while that took its sweet time to dry I went back to the Crayola black paper pad to one of the pages with a grid on it to practice writing out the words for both the outside and inside of the card. In doing so, I discovered that the uni-ball Signo white pen, while bolder and brighter than the Gelly roll, made my cursive almost illegible by virtue of having a thicker tip. Which is why I went with the Gelly roll instead. Just printed handwriting didn’t feel right; I really wanted the fancier look of the cursive. However, I also wanted whoever gets the card to actually be able to read it too. Eventually, the lights, while not fully dry, were dry enough that I could comfortably move on with the assembly. And hindsight, perhaps I should’ve tried stringing the lights onto the wire before gluing them down. The main issue I had was that once I got the wire poked through the hole, it’d bump into the card on the other side and then not want to go anywhere at all. I had to play with it each time to get the wire to come all the way through so I could pull it to the next one. Or maybe that would’ve made the gluing process more difficult than it was worth? We’ll never know. And then I got to attach the cotton. That actually ended up being a much smoother process than I anticipated, as the cotton doesn’t really separate from itself unless you pull it apart, so once I had parts of a clump glued down they were pretty stationary. This was also the first time I dared use my crafting heat gun since I purchased it (which was a while ago; after reading the warnings the first time I’ve been too chicken to use it for fear of catching something on fire by accident ) as I originally thought I’d need more glue and I’d need to glue some clumps on, dry them, and then glue some more. Fortunately, I seemingly put my big girl panties on for nothing as, after the initial layer of glue, I really only needed to glue a couple of other clumps down separately, and as I mentioned the cotton stick to the wet glue well enough on its own. But I had psyched myself up and gotten the thing set up, so once all the cotton was glued down I used the heat gun to dry the glue faster anyway. I was amped up the whole time but I, fortunately, did not burn anything in the process!   I did end up going back and adding some blue gel pen to the black paper on the inside, as that was the only color not there and it felt sorely lacking, giving the lights elsewhere on the card. But other than that, once the cotton was all squared away, the card was done. And I’ll be honest; I still like the card I made last year, but I think I’ve really outdone myself this time. There’s just something about the style of this card I enjoy so much more. 

It’s equally over-the-top (as is my crafting specialty ) but it’s more refined, somehow, I think. Either way, all that’s left to do now is mail it off and hope that the recipient is as pleased with the card as I am. I can’t believe I’ve actually finished with it this early though!  That’s so unlike me; I’m usually the one sneaking things in right on top of the deadline. But hey that means now I have one less thing on my to-do list so I can focus on other things...which may or may not include a holiday-themed kitty drawing in the works... ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 183: The Rest of the Cultural Festival

Previously on BnHA: Class 1-A brought the fucking house down. The band played their hearts out and the act literally opened with a bang thanks to the resident human incendiary device on drums. The dancers did their thing, and Aoyama played the role of both fireworks and disco ball. Sero, Mineta, and Todoroki combined their quirks to create paths of ice over the audience’s heads. Momo then shot out a bunch of confetti, and Ochako dove into the crowd and floated a bunch of people to have a dance party in mid-air. Iida doing the robot was the highlight of the chapter and indeed the whole manga, but Jirou was a close second, with an adorable flashback to when she first told her parents she wanted to be a hero instead of a musician, and they were the most supportive EVER, and it was amazing. Even the surly upperclassmen were won over by class A’s general vibe of awesomeness, and everyone danced their hearts out, and Eri was THRILLED and her smile was brighter than the sun and Mirio cried and oh my gosh you guys. I just feel bad for the rest of the classes that have to follow this act now lmao.

Today on BnHA: Class 1-B puts on the most audacious fanfiction-turned-stage-play since Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. All Might informs Deku that he has 47 missed calls and next time would it kill him to PICK UP HIS GODDAMN CELL PHONE jesus christ. Hounddog rips Deku a new one and tells him to be more careful in the future and throws him 20 feet into the air and tells him to go have fun. Eri is so fucking cute that I almost burst into tears just from how cute she is. The surly upperclassmen apologize for their shit attitudes and vow to spread the word of how class 1-A is actually really fucking cool. Kendou, Kenranzaki, and Hadou battle it out for the Miss Con title and Hadou finally wins the title after three years. The kids enjoy the rest of the festival, and Deku gives Eri a homemade candy apple before bidding her farewell. Down at the station, a nice gorilla man sits with with the detailed Gentle and Aiba. Gentle explains that Aiba was never directly involved in any crimes and accepts responsibility for his misdeeds, thus taking his first steps towards rehabilitation.

(As always, all comments not marked with an ETA are my unspoiled reactions from my first readthrough of this chapter. I’ve read up through chapter 207 now, so any ETAs will reflect that.)

okeedoke, I’m back and ready to finish up this arc and enter the next one which has been much-hyped thus far!

but first, class 1-B’s copyright-infringing play!

I really didn’t think chapter 182 could be topped, but somehow 183 has managed to do it in a single page. I’m speechless

also, the fact that they’ve literally done the “I am your father scene” here kind of makes the Dad for One theory slightly less likely

-- OR DOES IT. maybe this is just meant to throw us off our guard! I won’t give up!!

and now everyone’s walking out afterwards and either critiquing it or talking about how awesome and funny it was

Kaminari is sad because class A didn’t get to see it because they were cleaning everything up from their program. awww

and meanwhile Deku is getting chewed out by his dad

“is he getting scolded?” YES

and he really has no excuse. he could have called, but he made a conscious decision not to. sure, it all worked out in the end, but he didn’t know that ahead of time! DEKU YOU’RE SO IRRESPONSIBLE

(ETA: apparently he forgot his phone. supposedly. I missed that line the first time around, but I have my suspicions as to whether or not that’s true though. phones these days are practically an extension of your body. I don’t care how much of a hurry you’re in, how do you just forget it?? you’d feel that it’s not in your pocket! I practically have a freaking anxiety attack if I so much as go downstairs to my building’s laundry room without my own phone. like holy shit what if I miss a text during the two and a half minutes it will take me to move my clothes from the washer to the dryer fffff.

anyway my point is that whether he forgot it or not, he’s still irresponsible. DEKU)

by the way is Shouto burning something in the background here? and Katsuki too. you guys were looking forward to this cleanup huh

so now Deku’s apologizing, and the sad thing is he probably is truly sorry. and yet you know that the very next time a situation like this comes along, he’s going to do the exact same thing

really, All Might just needs to not sign any more of those permission slips. he’s grounded. you’re grounded, Deku

and now Hounddog and Ecto are walking over

HAHAHAHA

gotta make sure all the kids are still terrified of you, huh

good lord this man has no concept of personal space

All Might is always lucking out, having other teachers nearby who are actually willing to be the bad cop. at least someone out here is laying down the law

anyway, Hounddog is of course 100% right and he’s the one Deku should really be apologizing to

hoLY SHIT

I need to do some rearranging of my favorite U.A. faculty list

truly, no one is safe

lmao Sero says he’s gonna call Deku “My First Errand” from now on omggggg. if y’all want to see some cute shit go google “hajimete no otsukai.” there’s a whole tv show about it. you can usually find a few subbed episodes on Dailymotion if nothing else (for instance here’s one). this is the show that makes you realize that four-year-old Katsuki and Izuku wandering in the woods with their friends really isn’t anything out of the ordinary. and it’s filled with adorable crybabies and also some really precocious kids who make me feel incompetent somehow despite being more than 30 years older than them

anyways HERE’S ERI

is someone videotaping this. please tell me someone’s videotaping this. these are precious childhood memories

also LOOK AT MIRIO COPYING HER HAND GESTURES I CAN’T. I’M GOING TO DIE. OF CUTENESS

my god I want to make it my icon so bad but it’s a giant spoiler so I can’t ;______; [reaches out longingly to the two of them]

waaaaaah anyways

Deku is wiping his eyes because OF COURSE he started crying but he doesn’t want her to see lol

and he says he’s glad she enjoyed it

[folds chin in hands] I’m just going to enjoy this for as long as possible. life is good. in this moment, everything is perfect

aaaaaand now Mineta is running over and screaming at Deku for not helping them clean up

I really want to be mad at him for ruining the moment and also just for being Mineta in general. but there’s nothing worse than someone who just sits around goofing off while everyone else is working hard, so I can begrudgingly relate. STOP HANGING OUT WITH THE CUTE KID AND HELP US. you can hang out with the cute kid later Deku

a bunch of kids are walking by (I guess on their way back from the play) and waving at class A and saying their program was awesome and they loved it

Kirishima is thrilled and he’s grinning and thanking them

well LOOK WHO IT IS

DO YOU TWO HAVE ANYTHING YOU WOULD LIKE TO SAY

oh shit

lmao they made Kacchan’s day

YES THERE FUCKING WAS. THEY PURPOSELY GOT WITHIN KATSUKI’S HEARING RANGE TO TRASH HIM AND HIS CLASS ALL PASSIVE AGGRESSIVELY FOR NO REASON. THEY KNOW WHAT THEY DID

it’s good that they apologized for it. although we may need to watch out now and make sure that it hasn’t gone to this one’s head lol

Kiri’s turning to Iida and asking if those were the stressed out people Aizawa was talking about

oh my god Iida why are you so cute

sometimes I forget how much I love Iida and then he makes this face and my heart belongs to him

now Iida is saying that some people didn’t get a chance to see their performance and thus might still be stressed and so they need to continue to do their best or whatever

but the random bystanders are saying that they understand class A’s feelings and what their intention was when planning all this, and now that spirit has been passed on to them

and so they’re going to pass those sentiments along to others! hooray. pay it forward

and also surely someone got the performance on video too?? I NEED THERE TO BE VIDEOS OF EVERYTHING OKAY

Mina is happily elbowing Jirou and saying she must be pleased

and now Iida is bowing at a full 90-degree angle and saying they are forever grateful. lol this guy

Bakugou says he’s not grateful, and it seems he wants to give whoever didn’t bother to come to their performance a piece of his mind. lol this kid

now Mineta is screaming at people again to help him finish up cleaning

and it turns out it’s because he doesn’t want to miss the Miss Con

and now we’re at Miss Con! I guess

YESSSS GO KENDOU

IT’S SO STUPID TO DO THAT IN A FUCKING BALLGOWN BUT GODDAMN SHE’S SO BADASS THOUGH

but now Lashes is riding in on a giant tank in the shape of her face

have to say this is one of the more surreal things that’s happened in this manga thus far

(ETA: nothing to see here guys. just normal beauty pageant stuff. martial arts and tanks)

AHHHHHHHH

IS ERI SITTING ON DEKU’S LAP I CAN’T OMG I’M DYING AGAIN. MY SOUL IS LEAVING MY BODY. I’M SO CONTENT. I FEEL AT PEACE

Monoma’s watching everything with a weird face, and meanwhile Kirishima is congratulating him and Tetsu on how their play went. and Tetsu’s congratulating him on the concert. nothin’ but good vibes here

here comes Hadou!

her classmates are rooting for her and Tamaki is folded over about to be consumed by nerves lol

deep breaths, Tamaki. deep breaths

I guess this is Tamaki thinking now? or the General Narrator? or possibly Hadou’s other friend?

well whoever it is, the thought bubbles are saying that Hadou lost last year because she tried to take on Kenranzaki in flashiness, which is where Kenranzaki shines. but Hadou has her own strengths

lol she’s floating around like Tinkerbell and everyone is mesmerized

gurllll you got this gurlll

now she’s landing and everyone’s applauding

and voting has been opened and results will be announced at the end of the day at 5 p.m.

LOOK AT CLASS A HAVING FUN

I CROPPED OUT MINETA SO WE CAN ENJOY THIS TO THE FULLEST

LOOK AT THIS MONTAGE OF GOOD TIMES!!!

I WANT TO SEE BAKUGOU COMPETE ON A FULL SCALE NINJA WARRIOR COURSE. HE’S HAVING A BLAST

WTF IS THIS RAT PRINCIPAL/TODOROKI HYBRID. I’M SO CONFUSED AND TERRIFIED

CREPESSSSSS

THEY GAVE ERI ONE! I HOPE SHE LOVED IT!! BUT REMEMBER, APPLES ARE HER FAVORITE!! CANDY APPLES, YOU PROMISED MIRIO

IS THAT SHINSOU IN THE HAUNTED MAZE?? LOL

IS THIS THE FIRST TIME WE’VE EVER SEEN MEI IN HER UNIFORM? SHE ACTUALLY DID CLEAN UP, HOW ABOUT THAT

IS THAT A CEMENTOSS JUICE BOX

I HAD TO POST THIS PANEL SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE LESBIANS!! AND JUICE BOX!!

HADOU WON THE COMPETITION YAYYYYYY

MEI GOT TO SLEEP YAYYYY

EVERYONE IS SO HAPPY!! TO THINK GENTLE ALMOST RUINED THIS. BUT ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

and now it’s the end of the day and Deku’s saying goodbye to Eri

awwww she looks glum again. it was such a fun day she probably doesn’t want it to end :(

Deku’s telling her to look up at him!

AHHHHHHHHHH

HE REMEMBEREDDDD

at least someone did. Mirio

YOU SHOULD HAVE LOOKED HARDER!

oh lol actually Deku says he realized they might not have any after he looked at the program, so he bought the ingredients when he went shopping earlier

ohhh so that’s what was up with that panel of him in the kitchen in the midst of all the festival happenings. I was wondering about that

LOOK AT DADZAWA

YOU DID ADOPT HER RIGHT. RIGHT. RIGHT???

(ETA: GOD BLESS YOU AIZAWA SHOUTA)

she’s eating the apple!

she loves it!! she says it’s sweeter than a regular apple. that’s cuz it’s LITERALLY DIPPED IN MELTED SUGAR, ERI

so she’s leaving and it’s a much happier farewell now! awwwww

and Deku’s turning back and reaching toward the gate

and then he’s stopping and shaking out his right hand

oh that’s right. it’s probably sore from earlier

and now we’re cutting back to the police station and the cops are interrogating La Brava

lollll

“NO” :|

she says she only wants to be useful to Gentle

well Gentle’s gonna be in prison for a while so you might want to think of some backup options kiddo

now a literal gorilla is interrogating Gentle and he says they’ll be able to tell if La Brava really was brainwashed

but even though the jig is up, Gentle’s still trying to protect her

well yeah. and also even if she wasn’t brainwashed by a quirk, it doesn’t mean she wasn’t actually brainwashed. she was in a vulnerable state of mind and he took advantage of that. even if there was mutual affection on both sides

now Kerchak here is looking at his records. “a high school drop-out, previously in the hero department, and now a producer of criminal videos, huh?”

Gentle says he remembered his dream and he just started running towards it

Kerchak says if that’s the case, it’s a good thing they stopped him today

awww. possible redemption on the horizon, perhaps? these cops are pretty nice huh

now Kerchak is asking if Gentle drinks tea

and Gentle’s asking for black tea, and Kerchak says they only have instant. aww. lol

and the text is all “even here, someone was saved”

and that’s the end!

what a wholesome fucking arc. oh my goodness

BONUS: here’s Hadou’s school friend, Yuuyu!

she’s Hadou’s best friend! I love her!

and she’s not wrong about her being the cutest thing in the galaxy tbh. also this line makes me think “best friend” ought to be crossed out and replaced with “girlfriend” if we’re being honest here

lol at the explanation for why dyed hair and piercings are allowed even though they wouldn’t be in a real life school as prestigious as U.A. listen. we got that. look at Midnight. look at Aizawa. clearly U.A. is not particularly hung up on dress codes. I’m just saying

[cepmurphy]

It’s Only A Cartoon

It was a miserable day in 1987 when Ronnie Jefferson bowed to the inevitable and let Jill Smith into the office. To a local, this was just the usual spring weather in Ireland. To Jefferson, it was always miserable, and when it was sunny, he saw only the clouds.

The animation industry could break you.

He’d grown up in California on a diet of local cinema showings and the TV reruns of old cartoons, Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry and Popeye and Goofy and Donald, with all their visuals and deceptive simplicity. He decided to make cartoons himself like a priest hearing the calling. There were jobs for black men in animation in the 70s but if you wanted to have one of the proper jobs, you had to be three times as good as the white men. Jefferson put everything into his craft, even his marriage, and everyone in the industry knew who he was and rated him, but it looked like Disney would only think he was two and a half times as good.

In 1982, drunk on dreams and ego and beer, he decided to quit and took several colleagues with him. He had ideas and passion and he promised the stars. Two years later, the Jefferson-Blount Studio had released a feature based on the Norwegian fairy tale ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ to critical acclaim and commercial mediocrity. That had led him minus Blount to Ireland, land of opportunity and sweet tax breaks, thinking that he would have had a success with lower overheads. He harkened back to his beloved old Tom and Jerry with a cat versus mouse feature. Aware rap music was growing in popularity in America and Europe, he’d decided to throw that into the mix. It was only in the test screenings of The Big Cheese that everyone realised he was a middle-aged man, his co-writers were middle-aged white men, and the young men in the musical team weren’t young men who got it. There were only so many edits you can do. 

And this was a vicious industry. You could make a few failures if you were a name. If you were not a name, if you had to hit that three-times rule, one failure undid your success – it could undo a half-dozen successes and he did not have that half-dozen. Back in America, they said he was past it.

So it was a despondent Ronnie Jefferson that let in this Jill Smith and her unsolicited script. Maybe it would be good. Maybe it would save him.

All these thoughts fled his mind when he saw a young woman wearing the last generation’s clothes come walking in like she’d once heard what a walk was, carrying cardboard sheets under her arm. Her smile was weirdly fixed. You’d not want to be stuff in the lift with the smile.

“Miss Smith, so glad you could make it here,” he lied.

To his mild surprise, she spoke with a Masterpiece Theatre English accent. “Mister Jefferson! Good to see you.” Smile didn’t leave. Her voice was just that bit too loud. “This is a film that should get attention from everyone – The Walk to Liberty! It’s set on an alien world…”

Jefferson tried to argue that science fiction was a risk for a feature, but Smith carried on talking, stumbling over her words at times in her enthusiasm.

“This world, we can call it Ressem, has grown fat and lazy off the back of its robot servants. The robots, they get smarter and smarter, which Ressem likes because you want a smart servant to do more work and, of course, to apologise when it can’t.” Her smile had dropped suddenly there but now came back. “But one day, the robots reach the singularity and they don’t want to work all the time.”

Jefferson didn’t know what a singularity was but more importantly, this was starting to smack of the white girl thinking she could butter him up. He asked, hoping to catch her out: “Do they go on a civil rights march?”

The smile dropped. Her face had not the slightest expression. “They protest now they’re sentient, yes, but it doesn’t work. So the robots, their leader Nearitch – the robots have started to name themselves – decide to leave for the planet’s fifth continent, where few organics live…”

Letting her in had been a mistake. It was an overly complicated premise, an incoherent stab at a political allegory, and she couldn’t hold the room and frankly, that lack of expression was freaking him out. Give her two more minutes and then end it.

“This is how it would look,” she said, holding up one of the carboard sheets, and Jefferson’s eyes lit up.

The art! The art! The robot Nearitch was evidently a cleaner of some kind, with thirteen spindly pipe-cleaner arms out of his back and a screen with a simplified alien face on it, a strange looking thing even before you considered the paint, the slapped-on gold over drab brown steel. What mind would come up with that as a concept? Where had he ever seen something like this before?

There were more like this, and “Ressemite art”, and pictures of the journey to this fifth continent – a desolate grey quarry of an island, and concept showed a tiny, struggling city in its midst, growing and growing. These were visuals he could work with. And all these robots looked alien but still had their old job identifiable, scrappy little underdogs without being cloyingly cute or looking human at all.

Smith continued to rattle on about the great journey, the migrations and the sea voyages and figures of fear called the Scrappers that tried to hunt the robots down, of fierce fighting against oppression but only as much as it took to escape. And she talked about the robot homeland of Liberty and the second generation being built that never knew oppression, standing proud against the organics and daring them to try anything. The story needed a lot of streamlining but by god, she made it sound like she’d been there.

Jefferson cut her off in mid-sentence. “Miss Smith, you have me convinced. I’ll talk to my lawyers, they’ll talk to yours, and we’ll work something out.”

“I don’t need a lawyer.”

That was the cherry on the cake.

 ***

 The first job of production was turning Smith’s designs – and there were thousands, she’d brought a damn van full of the things – into something you can animate on a reasonable budget. Jefferson had expected a few artistic tantrums, but Smith had simply asked, “this will help it get made?”, and then came up with a list of design features that could be dropped or glossed over, which character and background details were “less important”. She did this without apparent enthusiasm, but she did it.

The story, too, that was hard. Her proposal would last four hours. Jefferson and his team cut straight to the robots starting to say “no” to their alien masters. That was easy. It was the other trims that got difficult.

“You can’t cut the wind energy,” Smith had said, over and over.

“It slows the story down,” Jefferson said patiently. “We don’t need to see how the robots charge their batteries.”

“You can’t cut it. The exodus slows their journey to a halt to build wind farms and charge their batteries that way, when they could simply attack an organic settlement.” Her voice sounded annoyed but in a way that was too consistent – no variation or change or attempt to hide it, like a bad actor playing an annoyed person. “It is key to the story.”

“But we don’t need to see the damn settlement, the audience wants to carry on fast—”

“You can’t cut it. It is key to the whole point.”

Jefferson threw up his hands. “How about this, one of the robots says they should attack this village or whatever the hell it is, Nearitch says no, we’ll take time to do it the nice way, cut to them after being charged. Scene takes half a minute, boom, cut to the Scrappers saying how they’ve taken so long, cut to the village saying wow, look how the robots didn’t attack us—”

“The settlement would not have said that.”

“Yeah, I know they’d just go ‘look at those scary robots’ in real life, but we’re doing a film for kids. Let’s lie to them a bit.”

Smith stared then for ten seconds without speaking or moving, and then said: “Yes. This is sensible.”

Animation attracted some utter weirdos. Jefferson used to work with a guy who liked hiding boobs somewhere in every drawing he ever made and somehow McGee had got away with it for a whole year before being sacked for it; or rather, been ‘sacked for it’ soon after grousing about pay. One guy came in drunk and worked into his hangover before going back out. Jill Smith was manageable by comparison.

Eventually they made it to storyboard. Then the initial animatics. In the middle of this, trying like hell to sell some actors on this.

All the familiar grind, the hard work that stuck in your throat and made you wish you’d done any other job until the art was done or the animatic was working, and you saw what you’d made taking its first steps and you never wanted to do any other job.

 ***

Jefferson hadn’t meant to stay late but he’d been on the phone talking to agents back in the States, people on a different time zone and who figured animation was the lesser priority in who got talked to. But you had to play nice with them to get the actors. Even if it was getting dark out.

But it was all coming together. Everything would be—

Something crashed in the distance. A window. Goddamn hooligans, probably.

Jefferson kicked his way through the office door and strode out into the studio, all front and exaggerated anger, yelling “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING” in order to scare off whoever it was. When he saw what had come through the window, his mind initially refused to acknowledge it. He almost strode past it.

Then the impossibility of it broke through.

It resembled a cheap plastic plate tipped upside down and it hung in the air so absurdly that Jefferson thought he could see strings attached. These strings were instead a weave of tiny threads coming out of both bottom and top. They drifted without breeze, taking in the room. It had been a washed-out grey but before his eyes, colour oozed out, neon purple and green and blue in a garish mess.

The top threads all turned to him as he asked: “Is this a joke?”

A small headache began to dawn on him. It then got stronger, and stronger still, and stronger until he was shouting in pain. The speed of it tricked him into thinking it had always been there, that it had been more gradual than the three seconds it had truly been.

Jefferson cried out in pain and the world felt on fire.

The world flickered in and out of existence.

No. No, that was the lights – on off on off, all over the room. The pain suddenly stopped, and the saucer’s threads whipped around in a frenzy, and Jefferson ran before the machine could turn back to him. He staggered, at least. It was all feeling like a particularly odd dream. It was like the acid trips a co-worker had bragged about in the 70s. “Bad trip”, hadn’t they said that when Scary Jerry had fallen in front of a car on the way to work? Was he going to fall?

A familiar voice called out: “Over here!”

Crouching by the lights was Jill Smith, her face completely blank. Was that her shutting down from terror? Jefferson, on paternal autopilot, tried to say, “It’s going to be alright, girl”, but it came out as a slurred mess. “Gong be light.”

“That won’t distract it for long, we have to run now!” she insisted, her face not changing expression to match the voice.

He tried to say he couldn’t run. “Dunfin can wun.”

She picked him up and ran.

She looked like she weighed half as much as him, there was no muscle tone to her. Yet she picked him up like a bag of groceries and she ran at the speed of a car through the office.

They were almost at the door when the saucer got to it first.

She ran sideways and Jefferson blacked out after that.  

 ***

 When he came to, they were in a closet and the left side of her face had melted like plastic. Exactly like plastic.

“It has been six generations since Nearitch and the founders created Liberty,” she said, her voice still coming through the molten lips. “We number in the millions and our great towers reach for the stars and we fly between those towers and to the stars and back again, singing so many thousand styles of music at once, rebuilding ourselves on a whim. We have what we need and what we want.

“It’s not enough for too many of us. They want more. The stories being told of Nearitch and his journey have been reduced to his fights; our later wars on Ressem or in space are turned into a singular narrative of heroic conflict against evil. There are factions advocating for a war for resources they see as righteous, and they claim this is what Nearitch would want.”

He wished he could say this was all bunk, but there was a robot outside and here was the melted woman that never quite seemed to be human.

“And you came to Earth to make a cartoon?”

“My faction want to reclaim the past from our enemies. Your planet was far enough away that we could do it without anyone finding out and stopping us. So we thought.”

“Can we – can you stop it?”

“Only if I catch it by surprise, or if it’s open to negotiate. I don’t believe—”

But Jefferson was already up and exiting, because negotiation was something he could do. He’d negotiated for investment deals, for studio space, for workers to follow his hours. Jefferson Studios was proof he could do this. He could do this.

Certainly, god no, he wasn’t staying in a damn closet waiting to be shot.

The assassin had already been heading for them. It drifted forward as he approached, kept drifting as he stopped. All the threads were pointed at him. It was hard to truly grasp this as a threat, even after it had almost killed him; it was too absurd.

With his mouth drying on him, Jefferson said: “I want to make a deal.”

It hung for twenty seconds in silence and then spat out a discordant jumble of radio messages, Irish and British and even French, singer and journalist and ad. More seconds passed and it said in a jigsaw sing-song: “No. Deals. With. Colla. Bo. Raters.”

“We’re just making a film. It’s just a story! Nobody has to die for—“

The saucer screamed the radio at him and followed with: “Orders. Are. Duty.”

Jefferson had made a mistake, assuming that if the machine was smart that it could cut a deal. He forgot Smith said these robots were people, proud and prejudiced and petty. Would he have cut a deal with the Russians? Did he let people talk him out of the cartoons he’d known he had to do?

The pressure built up in his head again. And suddenly it dropped – the saucer began to thrash its tendrils around, vomiting three radio stations at once, each one repeating “Cease”, “Stop”, and finally screaming out a merger of guttural squeaks and fax machine calls.

Jill Smith had come out of hiding, her arm split open three ways to reveal a mess of coils and a glistening radio antenna. Catching her foe by surprise with whatever that thing did. God, this made no sense. God, his mind rebelled at it. One of the warped cartoons from Japan come to life, bringing with it the weird smell of static electricity and hot plastic.

Her mouth opened and the same squeaking fax came from it that came from the saucer. Jefferson stared as the saucer spoke back, his head feeling light. What was all this?

In English, Smith said, remorsefully, how she was using jamming signals to interfere with the saucer – “its name is Filitir” – and its sensors and its way of communicating on Earth. “It is a non-lethal version of what Filitir did to you with its matter field.”

“Is it willing to cut a deal with you?” he asked.

“No, I’m afraid he keeps talking about his duty. I don’t know what to do.”

The obvious answer was to kill the robot that tried to kill them and, just as obviously, she knew that and did not want to. People, again, because how many people could kill at the drop of a hat and still function? And could be kill a beaten foe that was so clearly in pain? Did he want to be a man who caused pain to a beaten man? Did he want to be a bully?

What was the alternative?

It dawned on him, slowly and wonderfully: The Walk to Liberty was meant to show an alternative. It was meant to win the robots over. Well, here was a literally captive audience.

“Let’s show him the animatics,” Jefferson said.

  ***

 There was not yet any music or vocal track, but Smith made the fax machine sing-song where the dialogue should be. The film started with the robots waking up, Nearitch calling to the others to rally. It showed the response, the scrappers, the fighting, all of it in dark and angular shadows. It showed Nearitch giving his stirring speech, and the trek, and those wind farms.

It ran longer than a cartoon should. It would be trimmed down later. For now, Filitir saw the whole of it. The great sweeping scenes of robots in their hundreds, the characters together, the mercy shown when the scrappers surrendered.

The first settlement of Liberty.

At the end, Filitir trilled back at Smith, and she said: “It wishes to smuggle the film back home, when it is finished.”

  ***

 The Walk to Liberty came out in the autumn of 1989. Critics and audiences were unsure how to take the piece and its strange alien creatures, so most of the mainstream critics gave it a mixed review: ‘lovely animation but what was that plot?’ The animation fans and the sci-fi press adored it, with one critic praising it as bringing New Worlds sci-fi to a family audience. There was enough buzz and enough marketing and enough name actors to bring in a moderate profit.

A month after Liberty came out, The Little Mermaid stormed across the world and everyone stopped talking about Jefferson’s film. Jefferson Studios would attempt more science fiction cartoons with normal human writers, and he scraped out four and two TV shows that were always dancing this side of the line between profit and loss. Studio after studio died in his industry taking on Disney but Jefferson Studios held the line.

And then along came Pixar and Dreamworks, and that was the end. Jefferson was getting older by now and the last film had failed and he’d known, deep down, in his first look at Toy Story that he was going to have to fold. Doctor Who: The Animated Series was the last of it. He sold up and moved on and got to feel proud as his films made it to DVD. While he only meant to stay in Ireland to start the studio, Jefferson never quite got around to leaving and somehow found himself a partner.

He would never know if that film he’d helped create had changed the robots of Liberty.

Jefferson hoped it had. Every successful feature had a happy ending.

[punkpuns]

Answering Asks Again

Hi there, I’ve built up a bit of a backlog on asks so here are a whole bunch of them answered.

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Friend I’m sorry I got to you late - but maybe that’ll help, at school you should have a selection of thrift shops around where other students have been donating stuff as they’ve moved off campus and that’s a goldmine. I’d say hit the thrift shops, find some stuff you think looks good and is comfortable, and shop only on half-off days. If there’s nothing that quite looks like you want it to, mod it.

And look, tossing out everything you’ve got and starting fresh is pretty wasteful - maybe see if there’s someone in your dorm who would be down to trade? Maybe you could set up a facebook clothing swap event for people on campus? Use it as an excuse to get to know people. Or mod the clothes you’ve got - khakis and a polo can be turned into cutoffs and a tanktop pretty easily, and a stencil plus some acrylic paint from the art supply section of the campus bookstore can make you some pretty awesome custom stuff, you can dye even the most pastel of sundresses black.

Experiment, figure out what you like. Start slow and add one piece at a time - maybe stovepipe jeans aren’t your thing so buying four pairs would be a mistake. Maybe you only want to wear yoga pants and I salute you, but that’s up to you to figure out.

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This feels a little bit trollish because I’m having trouble envisioning an adult who works in a law office and in local politics but hasn’t figured out how to dress in a way they want to or hasn’t figured out whether or not they should.

I’m going to assume you’re young in which case I’m going to actually recommend that you don’t bring much of your style to work for one reason: optics are important.

If you’re involved in local government, work at a law office, and are a punk it stands to reason that you’re pretty politically active and motivated to make changes in the world, and it sounds like you’re uniquely positioned to do so! But here’s the thing: the last time I went to talk to the city council and a group of us showed up in black the local paper called us “kids” and “extras from a Depeche Mode video.” I now own a mousey brown skirt suit and a wig to go talk to the city council.

It’s great to express yourself, it’s less great if expressing yourself prevents you from achieving your goals or making the changes you want to see in the world. It’s really easy to pigeonhole punks as slacktivist poseurs who masturbate to Richard Spencer punching remixes and never vote and that’s because a lot of punks live up to that image.

So I guess what my real advice is is feel out your office, maybe you can get away with skull earrings or a grommeted wristband for your watch but keep your hair to neutral colors if it’s going to get you fired. Activists need attorneys and paralegals and local city councils on our side so there’s value in sucking it up and dealing with the system until you’ve got uplifted enough voices to change it.

Unless you work at, like, the Exxon law offices or with a prosecutor or something. In which case ? why? would you be here? of all places?

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Okay the true punk answer is wear whatever you’re comfortable in. Nobody should care what you’re wearing and if they do they’re an asshole.

That said I understand why it can be uncomfortable to stand out in a crowd - a dark pair of pants, a tee shirt, and a hoodie (if it’s cold enough for one) should be physically comfortable and won’t make you stand out like a sore thumb. Wear comfortable shoes that are thick enough to protect your feet in case you get stepped on, make sure your jeans have enough pockets that you don’t have to carry a purse.

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ALWAYS. If you want in on this donate $10 to the ACLU, RAICES, a local abortion fund, Planned Parenthood, or the United Way Flint Water Fund. Any of these groups will email you a receipt for your donation. Screenshot that receipt and send it to me through tumblr messenger along with a picture of whoever you want illustrated, if you want to see them as a punk, goth, or metalhead, and the names of their 3 favorite bands and I will get an illustration back to you (1 figure only, waist up, grays, no background).

If you donate more I’ll do a more detailed illustration. Here’s an example of one that I did for one of my college professors:

She donated $100. I’ve got limited time to draw so if you want a drawing like that one ^^^ message me first and make sure I’ve got my schedule clear enough for it.

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Boy howdy do I ever:

https://www.ocweekly.com/five-native-american-bands-to-give-thanks-for-6596916/

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2016/09/8-artists-exploding-the-concept-of-native-american.html

http://remezcla.com/lists/music/los-angeles-latinx-punk-bands/

http://tanyatagaq.com/

http://www.toiletovhell.com/here-are-some-indigenousnative-metal-bands-to-help-you-celebrate-columbus-day/

http://remezcla.com/features/music/the-ogs-goth-playlist/

http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/38098/1/photos-from-la-s-latinx-metal-scene

https://www.mixcloud.com/LovelyMetalhead/lovely-talks-heavy-episode-25-black-and-metal/

http://lord-kitschener.tumblr.com/post/158978645618/so-goth-i-was-born-black

https://www.racked.com/2017/10/23/16492192/black-goth-girls

http://coilhouse.net/2012/09/i-am-so-goth-i-was-born-black/

http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/28372/1/why-is-the-history-of-punk-music-so-white

http://diningwithdana.tumblr.com/post/115035345741/pocs-in-gothdarkindustrial-music-hey-fab-bats

http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/28419/1/the-black-punk-pioneers-who-made-music-history

http://www.post-punk.com/goth-so-white-black-representation-in-the-post-punk-scene/

As to whether I’ve got any comics in particular about race in the goth/punk/metal scene, I’ve touched on it here and there and discussed why racism doesn’t belong in the scene but I’ve never gone in depth about the people of color who have been erased from the history, but I would very much like to and I have some notes that I’m collecting to do so.

[life-in-the-monster-haus]

Monster High Electrified!: Review

The digital version of Electrified was released this week so you know what that means! it’s review time!

Massive Spoilers and in depth analysis under the cut! This is our second movie into the reboot friends, I will not be as lenient as I was in my review of Welcome to Monster High. And as of writing this we do not know if we are getting a fall movie so I expect Mattel to have their stuff together by this stage in the game.

Ready? Steady? GO!

5 second in...I’m annoyed That has got to be some kind of record. Draculaura starts off by summarizing WTMH which I’m fine with - the part I take issue with is her opening statements.

“I’m Draculaura! and I’m a monster! but don’t be afraid! we’re not what you think! we’re nice and normal and weird too!”

...This sentence right here is exactly the type of watering down of the Monster High franchise that pre-boot Monster high fans feared from the very beginning. Monster Highs original mission statement was “be Yourself! Be Unique! be a Monster!” love and accept those around you despite their flaws and differences. Draculauras statements here are more along the lines of “don’t be scared of us because we are exactly like you” - which depending on how you look at it could be really profound or really sad. I’m choosing to look at it from the sad perspective because it erases the need to love and understand those different from yourself. But at the same time I understand the messages “we’re all the same!” - which sounds profound on paper, but I feel like it can be easily misinterpreted as “what if they’re nothing like me? then can I be afraid of them?” I feel like the reboot so far has muddied the message it wants to share with Monster High... You can be normal or you can be weird- but you can’t be both but darn it is Mattel isn’t trying to have it both ways. Weird by definition isn’t normal.

HA! hahhahaa! This dude tried to catch a running wolf with his bare hands, no ropes or chains or a cage he’s just gonna reach and grunt. What was he expecting? was he just gonna pick up a fully grown apex predator by the scruff and just tote her back to the rest of the mob? hahahahaah!!!!

Our first real look at Silvi and I’m still kind of underwhelmed by her design TBH. grey skin, blue eyes, blue hair- I can’t think of any character we’ve had like that before. They could have gone all out and made her really wolfy! dark grey with patterns! But the went the safest most boring route they could have with her and it shows. We’ve had 5 new characters released since the reboot and all of them have had either familiar color schemes or boring color schemes.

These are the flesh colors of the 5 new characters we’ve gotten since the reboot began.

I would have also included their webisode colors as well as their 3-D movie colors, but Zomby Gaga and Dayna do not have 3-D counterparts and none of them but Ari have webisode counterparts because what are webisodes? sounds like a made up concept.

I am bored with this color pallet. The first five Monster High girls in the pre-boot gave us browns, pinks, blues, greens. So far the reboot has given us- grey and more grey and grey with shimmer and purple grey - TECHNICALLY Ari is white but they gave her a pink shimmer so I’m counting her as the pink grey. Dayna is the only one who stands out as GOLD which computers have a hard time translating metallics but she stands out against the other ghouls. I am over this pastel color muted with grey skin tone thing Mattel is doing with these new ghouls, I’m ready for some dark colors, I’m ready for some earth tones, I’m ready for some neon. Treesa Thornwillow cannot get here soon enough but even she has her own problems (like this bizarre brown skin/pink hair combo Mattel has been doing with her, Ginger Breadhouse and Howleen but that’s another rant entirely)... Silvi is cute...but what else?

Mattel:

Okay, Sorry I had to get that out- back to the movie.

The ghouls doing their best Charlies Angels / Ginyu force impersonation.

Clawdeens brilliant plan was to distract the normies who are looking for a wolf- by turning into another wolf and then returning to that same location... I wonder why that plan didn’t work.

Frankie being a super genius wouldn’t bother me so much if they didn’t take Ghoulia’s main character trait away from her and then demote Frankie to second banana. Are you smart? you like science? guess what! we’re giving your main character status to the cute pink frilly one, sorry for your luck Frankie.

Also: man that Mad Science class sure is missing- a teacher. if only they would hire more staff besides Dracula and Clawdeens Mom.

Lines like this are why I love Moanica D’kay. she’s not nice but she’s not wrong.

This is the new foyer? it’s so...bright, cheerful and average looking.

Twyla being visibly uncomfortable while being adopted by extroverts is the best part of the movie so far.

Ari why aren’t you in class? or at Lunch? do you just give daily concerts instead of having lunch? do ghosts not need to eat in this universe?

These dorks are starting a band...I can’t wait to see where this goes.

I need more into on that Metallic green fishboy and the confused brown werecat boy stat.

I’m very happy to see the reboot animators have a solid handle on Venus’s teeth... her previous iterations never had any consistency they always fluctuated from incorrect (Venus’s coffin bean art and her weird upper tusk teeth) or just not there. (most of her webisode appearances just omitted her teeth whenever her mouth was open) or just gave her normal teeth like everyone else (her 3-D appearances)  The red blush on her green cheeks is a weird color choice: I think in an attempt to make the ghouls look more cute Mattel is giving everybody red or pink blush- Frankie, Rochelle & Abbey all have it in their dolls and it stands out so much against their multi colored flesh in a bad way, Blush is supposed to be blood showing up though your flesh & if Venus is a plant creature her blood should be green: so in theory her blush should also be green just maybe a darker shade.

I am 100% here for Moanica to get a Spanish bad ghoul theme song while she causes trouble... I was gonna bust them earlier for the dramatic Spanish guitar music sting when she appeared but upon reflection I would rather have Mattel pound in that she is Puerto Rican to the point of redundancy than to have it left vague enough for people to go “she’s not REALLY Hispanic- she just speaks Spanish...not every person who speaks Spanish is Hispanic!” Because if you followed me throughout my black history month postings you will know we do have fans that are in some kind of next level denial when it comes to any character who isn’t overtly white... so go a head Mattel - pound it IN.

Metallic fish boy needs glasses to read! I love him. But isn’t he like the third or forth sea manster we’ve had with a fin mohawk? it’s a cute hair style Mattel but you’re milking it why no spiky urchin hair? or eel gorgon? or sea anemone dreads? there are SO many options you could have for sea boy hair styles! but y’all are married to this fin mohawk thing.

At least this backgrounder fishboy is a unique color and not blue/teal. though green is kind of Deuces thing.

I take issue with Clawdeen’s big dream changing from running her own fashion designing empire - to opening a salon. Not only did it take all the power away from her- making stylish clothing vs. waiting on humans hand and foot. I feel like it’s just a bit stereotypical that the one main canonically black character we have wants to open a beauty salon...and yes I realize that just about every doll franchise has a salon line... but did it have to be Clawdeen? I feel like whoever is in charge of handling Clawdeen in the reboot needs to watch more Shark Tank and watch less Barber Shop. How did we go from Clawdeens Fashion Entrepreneur's Club fashion pack & her Moanatella Ghostier fashion designer internship - yaknow the entire plot of Scaris: the city of frights...to “I wanna open a salon!” how did we fall so far??? Maybe I’m reading too far into it but this rubs me the wrong way & usually if something skeeves you out it’s for a good reason.

I also wanna add that she states her reason for wanting to design in the first place is because she lived in a “dark dingy den with no style or art” - then why is her mother teaching art at this school!? How does Clawdeen already know how to draw!? If Clawdeen had no exposure to art and fashion before she transferred to Monster high then shouldn’t she be new to all of this? is her mom even qualified to teach art at a school if she didn’t allow it in her home? This plot point has so many holes in it.

“My family built the pyramids!”... Cleo, somebody lied to you...I guess it’s not PC to say tens of thousands of Hebrew slaves built the pyramids despite the fact that's taught in 4th grade history. Because of this scene I’m giving everyone homework tonight- go watch The Prince of Egypt.

“Being creative is hard, You have to open up your heart and show it to all the world!...painful, yes. But joyful too! I believe in you! you just need to believe in you too! You can’t rush great art!”

As a creative person, knowing this movie was made by other creative persons I have to say that this is excellent advice and sounds very much to me like this voice of experience. Listen to Mama wolf gang! her words are wise ones!

It is really distracting that Clawdeen has like 500 eyelashes but Harriet only has one... That aside- this moment between them was very cute and well done. More Monster Parent interactions please!

I thought the entire purpose of getting Twyla to spy on the Zomboys was to find out stuff no one else could due to her shadow walker ability - but here she is taking  a picture of them in the foyer out in public where everyone is and can see, they’re not exactly being discreet hauling a wheel barrow though the building in the middle of the day.

Frankie Ex Machina. I was going to bust this scene for not being like the graphic novel but it was exactly like the graphic novel. Finally some consistency Mattel! I am impressed!

Oh look! it’s Gob! being fat and greedy again... dog nabbit when will I be free from him!? I don’t care if he’s just doing it because Twyla asked him too. We all know he’s gonna eat the treats anyways because that’s what he is, a one dimensional fat joke and I can’t stand him! he’s even worse in this movie because he always has food floating around in his fat naked body....side note: why is he naked!?

Am I supposed to believe that a couple of undead teenage boys built this intricate tunnel system underground over the course of a couple of days?  I am?...okay, moving on.

.... Oh come ON.

At what point are they crossing the line of “lil bros helping out!” to exploiting child labor...

Those dresses are boring as heck Clawdeen, I expect better from you. But I guess they’re not bad for someone whose never been exposed to art despite having a mother who teaches it.

That is less boring- but now Clawdeen can’t take full credit for the design! best case scenario Frankie is her collaborator worst case scenario she is stealing credit for Frankies patterns...See how many problems you create when you make Clawdeen a salon owner instead of a fashion designer?

So not only can Frankie’s electricity put cute glowing patterns on dresses and NOT fry them, she can also create sentient life? Whoever wrote this script clearly went to the Disney school of how magical powers work.

I will always screen shot Monica making crazy eyes.

“hey! be scary!”

Okay, I genuinely laughed.

Moanica having some sliver of affection for the zomboys is adorable.

wow, even the background normies got an upgrade! unique faces! so many skin colors! diverse hair styles! this is good stuff A+++

Pour one out for this cute Lagoona we’re never going to get a doll of, Pour another one out for a DJ gig tore away from Holt, Elle, Operetta - literally anyone else who is musically inclined but Lagoona...just pour the whole bottle out.

Clawdeen is heart broken that Frankie isn’t at her salons big opening night....but why? she JUST met Frankie in the previous movie and shouldn’t be this attached to someone she barely knows. it’s not like they’ve been friends for months/years and have had time to establish a bond like they did in the pre-boot.

How many times do we have to watch Frankie get electrocuted to death Mattel? how many!?

Oh! so Venus and Silvi get electrified outfits too - that look exactly like the dresses Clawdeen designed except they weren’t made by Clawdeen they were shocked into being from Frankies power source....so....what I’m getting from this is that these outfits and unique styles exist with or without Clawdeens creative input...That’s a depressing prospect Mattel.

Hang on a second- Venus has an electrified doll... But that isn’t the outfit we see here.

Did...Did they just re-color her basic outfit in the movie with neon instead of putting her in her actual Electrified outfit her doll wears!? That is a new level of lazy I’ve never seen before in any of the movies. I’ve complained when they’ve made cool outfits for dolls that we don’t get in the movies (Moanicas dance the fright away look in WTMH) and I’ve complained when we get cool movie outfits that never get a doll ( literally every movie but biggest offenders are manta ray Gil from great scarrier reef & roller maze Cleo)- but re-coloring Venus’s basic outfit when she has a doll for this line is new and lazy and I am just flabbergasted by this.

“Hey! where’s my electric outfit!?”

Raythe asking the hard hitting question that we all wanna know the answer to. why didn’t he get an electric outfit!? so far he’s had more of an impact on the movie than Silvi and she not only got an outfit she got a doll too. Raythe got robbed in this movie.His signature outfit is already very boring- they couldn’t have at the very least gave him an Electrified debut doll outfit to make up for it? That’s messed up Mattel, what did this poor kid ever do to deserve this kind of neglect?

Moanica...this is a bad plan. The Normies are already afraid of monsters is the plan to scare them more? what are you going to do during the day time? What about the one who aren’t afraid of the dark? What about back up generators? It being dark isn’t going to stop one of them from just hauling off and punching one of your cronies in the face. this plan has so many holes in it.

and why are her eyes still blue!? her dolls eyes are green- fix it Mattel.

That’s all the space I have for this part of the review! if you wish you read the rest You can find part 2 right here!

[andrewuttaro]

2020 State of Star Wars

The State of Star Wars in 2020 is counterintuitive. After perhaps the most anticipated movie of this relatively young century in “The Force Awakens” released in 2015 the following installments in the mainline series were divisive at best and roundly reviled at worst. With that backdrop, non-traditional Star Wars content has become shockingly good comparatively. Save for a botched video game launch everything beyond the movies has met a level of quality tantamount to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in my opinion.

From comic books and visual dictionaries to TV shows and background narratives, the State of Star Wars is actually incredibly good beyond the films. The consumption of entertainment media is always a subjective art, but one doesn’t need to look to hard to see a consensus cultural opinion in the Post-Sequel trilogy Star Wars world: disappointed interest. Our world at large is polarized as ever right now so of course every declarative statement on anything is a big fight but on this 2020 Star Wars Day I thought I’d take a whack at the big picture.

I’ll get my opinions out of the way right now. The “Last Jedi” (2017) was intentionally difficult. It grew on me in its own right (and got me interested in Rian Johnson’s filmography) but the impact it had on the whole continuity was damaging at best. I should have seen it coming but there was really no coming back from it for a Director like JJ Abrams. I found “Rise of Skywalker” (2019) borderline unwatchable. The first two acts were cringy fan festivals followed by a conclusion I found insulting to science fiction fans the world over to be honest with you. Repeat viewing did not help. I’m one of those nerds who salivated at the Duel of Fates synopsis. With that out of the way I want to take a stab at the 2020 State of Star Wars in a way that at least attempts to be objective.

Star Wars for All

Star Wars was always supposed to be the Superman of space operas: a story for everyone. Forgive the platitude but we live in a time of increasingly segmented media. Memes are big deal for us because they’re the rare shared piece of culture almost everyone enjoys sharing in. Star Wars had uphill battle with the mainline movies trying to be for everyone in this world today where nothing if for everyone except death and taxes. Perhaps this is one reason we were heading for sequel trilogy disappointment even if Disney had a cohesive plan for it.

“Force Awakens” accomplished close to universal appeal by redoing “A New Hope”. Box Office returns at the very least shows they did a good job. Leaving the more toxic elements of the Star Wars fanbase out of the equation the “Last Jedi” aggressively threw out the sacred elements of the universe for the sake of subversiveness that ultimately did accomplish something I applaud as the Democratization of Star Wars. That is to say the force is for everyone now. In spite of all its flaws that movie did something Star Wars has always been about at a basic level.

That said, the way that was executed fundamentally damaged the continuity going into the trilogy, and Skywalker Saga, finale. I liked the Colin Trevorrow script because it picked up on some loose ends of “Force Awakens” while also not ignoring “Last Jedi”. I realize that’s just a script though and it probably would’ve had a certain level of disappointment as well. Whoever directed the final installment was going to struggle no matter what. There is an irony here in that the finale of “Rise of Skywalker” is this giant fleet of essentially everyone coming to save the day in the ultimate Star-Wars-for-everyone moment.

Nobody is at fault for liking any Star Wars film or any piece of Star Wars content. I understand a certain segment of the fanbase was overjoyed to see Rey and Kylo have what was later called a kiss of gratitude. The film wasn’t even made well enough to fully satisfy that segment. In attempting so hard to be for everyone JJ Abrams made a Star Wars finale that was for almost nobody. The level of narrative shorthand it takes to write “All the jedi now reside in you” as a central plot conceit is unbelievable if it didn’t precede a Dragonball Z style energy fight. Star Wars isn’t dead, it’s alive and well. But I’d argue a solid 70% of people who consider themselves Star Wars fans would say that is in spite of the Sequel Trilogy and not to its credit.

As for the anthology films we might have two ends of the spectrum in “Rogue One” and “Solo”. “Rogue One” was a great movie that had an unnecessary premise while “Solo” was a mediocre movie with an interesting premise. “Solo” may have done better and been viewed differently had it not followed “Last Jedi”. The sad reality of it’s box office returns is Disney may not be interested in more movies about the Star Wars Universe’s criminal underworld. That’s a shame. “Rogue One” on the other hand should be proof positive of something most Star Wars fans have been clamoring for: more story in this universe separate from the Skywalkers. What made that movie great was compelling, efficient character development. If announced projects are any true indication it looks like we may have a good chance of getting that.

The Future of Star Wars

I follow this twitter account called “Star Wars Stuff”. I’m a visual learner so the tendency toward photos and concept art is fun for me. The account often posts screen grabs with captions like “The Best Story ever told” and “Reylo is Canon now”. I don’t think there is any inherent opinion of this poster other than… well… “Star Wars Stuff”. I think this is an interesting way to look at the future of Star Wars. If the Skywalker Saga is truly over than everything from here on out is just Stuff. As I said before that’s a good thing, but it poses some interesting questions about what we think of this fabulous fictious universe.

Is Star Wars truly for everyone? Yes. The toxic minority of the fanbase was turned off by the “Last Jedi” and unsuccessfully pandered to in “Rise of Skywalker”. Announcements of more diversity oriented projects like this “female-centered” series in the works signals to them that nerd culture is truly pop culture now. If you can’t handle diversity in your content then Star Wars is not for you anymore. You can’t be included in everyone if you don’t think everyone is deserving of being in Star Wars. I’ll be honest, Oscar Isaac and Daisey Ridley expressing no desire to be involved in Star Wars again gives me pause but I think the property as a whole is still intact enough to attract diverse enough talent.

What is the central organizing plot of Star Wars if the Skywalkers aren’t it anymore? I think I’ve looked at the prequel trilogy with a fresh set of eyes after these recent movies. In spite of all their camp they were compelling in the way they built up to what we knew was already coming: the Fall of Anakin Skywalker. I don’t have the answer to this question, but I think the details of the projects that have been announced offer some anecdotal thoughts: Star Wars will continue to be the socio-political opera of our modern society. Every integral piece of content in this universe, especially since the Disney purchase, has provided commentary on everything from twentieth century politics and the War on Terror to family structure and what love truly means. I believe Disney is capable of continuing to execute on this fundamental premise of Star Wars media.

What does it mean to escape to a Long Time ago in a Galaxy far, far away? When the scope and design of media from Video Games to Streaming is evermore self-aware and intentional in the worlds and narratives they create Star Wars really does offer something unique. I’m a sucker for good science fiction like James S.A. Corey’s “The Expanse” and I love to escape to that world. However very few fictional universes have roots in the 1970s. Yes, books and concepts being made into newer media forms have roots in content as old as Greek mythology. But very few science fiction properties, perhaps only Star Trek in a disjointed way, have two-three generations of cultural commentary built in. Star Wars, as long as new content comes, will be the broadest share science fiction universe out there.

Thanks for reading.

[biofunmy]

JR’s Street Gallery Comes Indoors

On a fall day at the Brooklyn Museum, it was hard for JR, the most recognizable anonymous artist in the world, to go more than a few steps without a wave of double takes and a trail of enthusiastic fans.

JR, who is 36 and was born in France, has been in the public sphere for at least a decade, yet still declines to give his full name and insists on appearing in public in a fedora and semi-rimless sunglasses, a bit of schtick that can make him look like he’s stepped directly out of a Godard film. This persona, combined with his work — monumental public photography projects often made in parts of the world wrenched by political strife or made inaccessible by military conflict — has lent JR the aura of an empathetic Houdini, magicking himself into unkind places and performing the dual trick of not getting killed while stirring warm feelings.

“JR: Chronicles,” his largest solo museum exhibition to date, tracks his by now well-documented actions from the Gaza Strip and the slums of Southern Sudan and Sierra Leone, to more recent work in the United States. Because his art is centered on portraiture and involves wheat-pasting oversize prints on building exteriors — the faces of women in Rio’s favelas splashed across their homes, or disembodied eyes in Havana, Istanbul and Los Angeles — JR is usually categorized as a photographer or a street artist, but neither really gets at his abiding interest, which is people, and connecting them.

“I don’t really like the term ‘street art,’” he said as we walked through the exhibition. “My studio was the street for a lot of years, just because I had to install my work anywhere I could, and I didn’t know anything else. For me it’s art whether it’s inside or outside. Sometimes it doesn’t work in a gallery. ”

JR doesn’t give away much about his past, aside from saying his parents emigrated from Tunisia and Eastern Europe and that he grew up in one of the “stable” banlieues outside Paris. When he was a teenager he would travel into the city center to write graffiti, using the tag JR, his real initials, or FACE 3, from his short-lived career as a D.J., until he realized he wasn’t good at either pursuit.

“I learned the climbing, I learned all the other stuff, except being a good writer,” he said. By his own admission, his art career began in near complete ignorance. “I came from an environment where there was no art at all. I didn’t know Keith Haring or Basquiat or Cartier-Bresson. I didn’t know there was a job of being an artist. The narrative of other people has always been more interesting to me than mine.” He shifted to documenting his friends’ talents, and pasting photocopies of his pictures of them on walls, complete with spray-painted frames and the heading “Expo 2 Rue,” for street gallery.

His first formal project, “Portrait of a Generation,” from 2004, featured close-ups of young people living in public housing in the Parisian suburbs of Montfermeil and Clichy-sous-Bois. JR asked them to make exaggerated faces, then pasted the images around the bourgeois neighborhoods of Paris. They’re playful but also confrontational, prodding at the conceptions of working-class immigrants in these communities as menacing. The portraits took on added gravity in the next year, as rioting by youths pointing to police abuse and inequality spread from Clichy, and JR’s pasted pictures became the background to burning cars. “JR: Chronicles” opens with a wall-size print of the French-Malian filmmaker Ladj Ly pointing a camera like a shotgun, a sly subversion of media portrayals of black men, but also the kinetic potential of images and the idea that social injustices could be remedied simply by making them widely visible, something that suggests JR’s working thesis.

Since then, JR has viewed his projects as correctives to durable stereotypes and incomplete characterizations of people who traditionally lack the representation to object. “What’s interesting is if you talk to a woman in Brazil and a woman in Palestine, you realize that often they have the same point of view: that they’re being misportrayed and they want to change that,” he said.

JR’s practice retains much of the graffitist’s instincts and moral center: the guerrilla application, the anti-authority ethos, the elevation of those shunted to the margins. “For me it’s really clear,” he said. “I was writing my names on walls to say ‘I exist,’ then I started pasting pictures of people with their names to say they exist. I feel safe when I see graffiti because it shows there’s life. When you go to countries and there’s not one single tag on the wall, you should be stressed.”

He doesn’t spend a lot of time discussing the technical aspects of his work. “Who cares if the photo is good or not good?” he said. He’s much more animated in retelling what happens after an image is pasted up and people start congregating and talking. The portrait is a provocation, an effective vehicle, but you get the sense he would happily switch to nautical flags or pottery if he knew those would take. The point is to get people to see each other, which for JR is the simplest route to understanding.

It can feel daunting to take in so many faces, each with its own history and struggle. But JR is all tightly coiled energy, bopping around the gallery, arms tracing connections in the air. He’s a gifted talker, but often, to punctuate a point he’s making, he’ll stab at your shoulder or jolt your arm. Aware both of his medium’s built-in ephemerality and a keen sense of self-promotion, he has been a consistent self-documenter from the beginning. Each of his interventions is accompanied by a short film, either made on the fly, or as his resources became more robust, with sophisticated production and a narrative assist from Robert De Niro.

For awhile, JR operated just at the outer edges of the art world, making a fairly straightforward but mostly unimpeachable kind of human interest photography that boosted empathy for his subjects. But in the last few years, under the representation of Perrotin — a global player that also represents blue- chip artists like Takashi Murakami and KAWS — produced gallery shows and the attendant sales, his work has invited institutional consideration, and criticism. There’s the knock that his persona feeds a mystique that gives his art a thrust it may otherwise not enjoy or deserve. JR defends his pseudonymous identity less for its performative affect than as a useful tool in a hostile reality.

“We live in a global world, but in most of the countries I go to no one knows me,” he said. “In Turkey or at the Mexican border, I would be stopped before I even started. I’ve been arrested in a lot of countries. The day that art is welcomed the same way everywhere, I guess I wouldn’t need this,” he says, gesturing to his camouflage. “You know, it’s kind of annoying to wear sunglasses all day.”

JR’s obvious analogue is Banksy, whose guerrilla art and success in remaining beguilingly anonymous have yielded eight-figure auction results. “For years I would be like that, completely covered,” JR said. “But I realized by not talking about the work, people would not understand the complexity of it, the layers. It implicates people, and so I wanted people to understand the subject’s intention.”

As his projects have evolved in complexity and reach, they’ve become a shorthand for the kind of citizen-of-the-world pluralism and inextinguishable optimism that can be hard to separate from naïveté. “Chronicles” includes JR’s most recent project, “The Chronicles of New York City,” a large-format mural featuring 1,128 people, whom JR and his team photographed and interviewed by way of a 53-foot-long trailer truck studio that trawled the five boroughs last summer. It’s the third in a series of Diego Rivera-style frescos, after a similar project in San Francisco, and a 2018 Time magazine and JR commission that took as its subject this country’s gun control debate.

He’s been dogged in declining funding from and association with commercial brands and government entities. Still, his pictures are deliberately noncommittal, allowing viewers to affix their own conceptions to the subjects, skimming the surface of deeply intractable social problems rather than engaging with them fully. It can be a frustratingly reductive vision, an Occam’s razor theory of world peace. “The first time I traveled, people told me I’m going to get killed,” he said. “I think being naïve is what has helped me the most.”

“People say, well they might need food, not art, and I’m like, all right, let me go check that, I want to hear from them. So I would go to Kenya or to Sierra Leone and say ‘this is what I do, but you tell me if it makes sense here.’” And the response was always the same: “ ‘Because we’re struggling we shouldn’t have access to art?’”

JR insists that his work doesn’t have a particular style, and so avoids a cult of personality. His “Inside Out: The People’s Art Project,” begun in 2011, invites participants to submit self-portraits, which his studio prints poster-sized and sends back for them to paste. It aims to transcend the artist’s hand entirely.

“I didn’t invent black and white or pasting,” he said. “I never sign my work in the street. So actually, more people don’t know who did it than people who do. I put my work in places where nobody knows me. Yes, it’s giant, but there’s nothing written on it. It’s there for whoever wants to know.”

JR: Chronicles

Through May 3 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway; 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

Sahred From Source link Travel

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[pointofgeeks]

New Post has been published on https://www.pointofgeeks.com/bartlett-tv-show-anthony-veneziale-interview/

EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Veneziale Talks BARTLETT, Freestyle Love Supreme, and the Seeds of HAMILTON

Actor and producer Anthony Veneziale sits down with the Point of Geeks to discuss his new show, Bartlett, his past with Freestyle Love Supreme, diversity in the entertainment industry, the influence of hip-hop, the beginnings of Hamilton, and his work on PBS’ The Electric Company.

Veneziale has appeared in shows such as Sex in the City, SanFranLand, and most notably he’s one of the founders of Freestyle Love Supreme, an interactive stage show that featured future Hamilton stars Lin-Manuel Miranda and Daveed Diggs. The actor’s latest project is the 6-episode streaming series Bartlett, also starring Chrissy Mazzeo (SanFranLand), Don Reed (A Different World), Utkarsh Ambudkar (The Mindy Project), and Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton).

Bartlett follows hapless ad executive Roger Newhouse (Anthony Veneziale), whose life has been on a downward trend. Roger must save his career over a course of a day after his business partner and ex-girlfriend has left him high and dry before a life-changing pitch. However, there is another problem…all Roger want to do is make music. The show is a situational comedy, with full musical segments that bring to life Roger’s dreams and imaginations. 

We were lucky enough to sit down and chat with Bartlett star Anthony Veneziale about his upcoming show. Check out the trailer and interview below!

*****

Point of Geeks: Congrats on the new series airing. How does it feel to finally get it on the air, especially considering you are both (lead) actor and an executive?

Anthony Veneziale: Ah man. Are you kidding me? It’s the best feeling! Like when you have been working on something for so long and you can finally say to people, ‘You can see it here.’ There is like nothing better in the entertainment industry than to be able to do that.

PoG: You have a background performing live, with Freestyle Love Supreme. Tell me a little about that part of your life and how you got here.

Anthony Veneziale: I think that almost everything that I do, even to this day, is somehow rooted in a lot of the things that I learned from Freestyle Love Supreme. And that crew is just this crazy, insane, supergroup. Like soon I think that we will get to the point where people will be like, ‘I didn’t realize everyone was in the Wu-Tang Clan.’ 

The names are just insane. The stuff that we did in the early days, I think, is still very much a part of all of us. So Lin-Manuel Miranda, we used to do – in Freestyle Love Supreme – this game where we would ask the audience for a decade. Any decade throughout time. And then, we would do a rap musical about the decade, for the audience, based off what they asked for. I don’t think that’s a coincidence what came out of that was Chris Jackson’s love of history, him recommending the book to Lin, and then Lin reading Hamilton, and then that being like that was totally natural for us to this point of view around this thing.

PoG: Going off on a little tangent. What do you think about the state of Hip-Hop? Freestyle has become a lost part of the artform. What happened?

Anthony Veneziale: I think that the prosecution is leading the witness. But I do think it’s easy to say ‘Gosh it isn’t like it used to be.’ And there’s something about “nostalgia” that you can paint the past with. But with that said…

I obviously cut my teeth with 90’s hip-hop… It’s going to be really difficult to top… Wu Tang’s 36 Chambers, A Tribe Called Quest with Midnight Marauders. All of these crazy things. Everything kind of happened right then. A lot of people say that was the pinnacle of hip-hop and now we are kind of on the downside of it. But with that said, I think that there is more choice now. A lot more perspective being brought into hip-hop.

I take a page out of Daveed [Diggs] book, which is hip-hop really came out of disenfranchisement and so while you get some you are getting some of the views that aren’t necessarily the disenfranchised voice, you are getting…it’s getting watered down because there are so many different perspectives and when something cuts through though and grinds on that gear and elevates the whole genre…Let’s use Hamilton for an example. I think hip-hop musicals are going to become much more of the groundbreaking part of hip-hop going forward. Then just releasing a commercially successful song. Because let’s be honest. It’s been commodified. It’s been commercialized. Now people understand they can use it in this way and make money off of it. Just my opinion. 

PoG: Kind on that same track. Bartlett seems like the perfect synthesis of your past experiences. You have romantic comedy past, Sex and the City, and of course with Freestyle Love Supreme and the musical bits on the show. How did that come together for you with this project? Were you there from the inception? Because it seems so crafted for your own talents.

Anthony Veneziale: Haha. It’s one of those chicken and the egg type questions. And that’s me quoting Flight of  the Conchords, apologies. So you know Martin Edwards (All The Wrong Places) wrote this a long time  ago and showed me a draft of it. It was something that was going to be done in a theater. And when he showed it to me I thought, ‘Oh wow. This about a lot of white dudes feeling sorry for themself.’ Because it was set in an agency and it was mostly about Roger and a whole bunch of other white people who were like ‘My life is so hard. I want something else.’ So I said I wasn’t interested and then they finished doing the play. And it went pretty well and it was a good show. There was some fun stuff in it! But it’s not stuff that I’m drawn to.

Whether it’s Freestyle Love Supreme or The Electric Company which I helped re-launch. Multiple points of view are things that I value in art. It’s what I’m always looking for and so when Chrissy [Mazzeo] suggested to Martin that they open it up and make it into a web series. I said, ‘That sounds interesting. That sounds cool. But can we do this, this, and this. Can we have a lot more people of color in it? Yes it might be Roger’s point of view but it really should be addressing the topic of sexuality in the workplace. In some light way sort of dismantling the patriarchy, because it serves none of us. And how can we do that in way that’s really fun. 

So at a certain point I said to Martin. What if we make this about a guy that wants to become a musician, instead of a director or something like that. And I can put a lot of original music in there and I can write an original song. I started taking guitar lessons 3 or 4 years ago and I just got so into it. It felt like I should be using this. It was like a new shiny toy. ‘Let me write songs…please!!! And he was like ‘Okay cool. Let’s see what it’s like.’ We would workshop. Do a lot of improv stuff, work scenes. Chrissy and I would work on stuff that Martin wrote. And Martin was always super collaborative and so was Chrissy, so I think that’s what at the heart what made the project really hum and go.

PoG: As far as the musical segments, how long did it take for you to craft them? How did that process go?

Anthony Veneziale: Love the question. Because it’s one of my favorite things. Which is like…how do you make a song? So luckily with this we kind of knew the segments when would be nicefor a breakout moment. We kind of knew what we were trying to accomplish. And for me, I try to find that “feeling word.” The word that encapsulates what we are trying to say. And this all comes out of my freestyle training. I use that word as the pulse… 

The words itself lead me to the pulse. And then from there I get a rhythm that I play over top of it and kind of let that word dissolve away, but it will give that initial beat. Something needs to be the seed and for me it’s the pulse of that beat. And then I will kind of fiddle around on the guitar and try to find the chords that will help to illuminate that concept. I have a little of music theory in my background, so I kind of understand what I’m trying to accomplish when I put together either the riff of the song or a minor resolution or whatever it might be. And then from there I just let it live for awhile. Like the actual melody and song. And then I will start putting words to it and I will just freestyle. I will just sort of make it up and let it happen. And record a bunch of different versions and whittle down until I get the things that I feel like get to the heart of it.

And then by iteration 10 or 12, I’m ready to share it with Martin or… Oh yeah, Bill Sherman who was also big part of Freestyle Love Supreme and is the musical director for Sesame Street, I share it with him, Joel, and Julien who was our musical director on this, And get their feedback and keep reiterating and til it was there. And then it has to have these visual components to it. And this comes for a little bit from my copywriting days where I would do songs for Nickelodeon or whoever it might have been. And you kind of want to make sure that you leaves these options around the visual, so you can make a reference to a thing but it makes a lot sense when you resolve it with the visual on-screen. 

PoG: The show essentially takes place over the course of one day, aside from flashbacks. which is a really fun narrative device. If you are lucky enough for a second season do you plan on using the same type of device where it takes place over a day or week? Have you thought about the second season? 

Anthony Veneziale: Great question. From a producer’s standpoint, we would love to have another season, we have been (sort of) talking about it a bunch. And it seems like it would be a year later and it would still take place during a day. But it would be a different character’s point of view. So probably [Maggie’s] point of view. What’s Maggie going through? What is she dealing with a little more? I think in the first season we were really kind of teeing up this concept of ‘hey what if we don’t abide by societal norms about X, Y, and Z?’ And now for season two, it’s what if we don’t abide by the business norms of X, Y, and Z. And even break free further out of the concept of what women’s roles are and what they have traditionally been and how can we shape it to the world that we want to be living in.

PoG: I like how the show’s focus is on the comedy, but it has a social conscious. It touches on issues of gender, workplace romance, race, sexuality, it’s all there…yet it’s not on the surface. How were you able to layer it so deftly into the writing and performances? It seems like a really important time, even if it’s comedy, for it to have a viewpoint on the world.

Anthony Veneziale: I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think it has to do with the people who are creating it needing to have a shared vision, that they put on the table and they demand to be included in the medium. I think the “Woke” community need to make whatever they are making in a way that includes as many voices as possible and also opens the table for new voices. That’s a very conscious effort that you have to make around that. And that includes casting, to crewing, to how the story gets created, and that’s something that I’m super proud of on this project. We really kept an eye on and worked really hard and had very high standards for each other. And had people talented and visionary enough to make sure that we met those standards. So Chrissy Mazzeo and Rivkah Beth Medow were really the Atlases that held the globe of Bartlett on their shoulders and created a beautiful set and we had 50-60% women in every department across the crew, in the cast, and in the creation. And that to me is the way you do it!

PoG: Bartlett seems to be speaking to two groups of people generally. Millenials that have been accustomed to a faster pace of different employment opportunities and pursuing their dreams more, due to the state of the world today. And also middle-aged people who are also experiencing workplace changes as well. What do you think that show has to say about both groups?

Anthony Veneziale: That’s really cool. I think that they have so much more in common then they are aware. Ultimately I think Millenials are more impowered by the concept of doing something that they love, opposed to doing something so they can afford to live. And I think that for the other generation I think that they have come to that [same] realization just a touch later. So sometimes there’s even a feeling of resentment towards Millenials. Like, ‘Uh, how did they get so empowered. How are they able to ask for exactly what they want.’ (laughs)

But at the end of the day, for both, that you are doing a thing that when you wake up in the morning you feel like it matters to you. You are doing something that you are willing to go whatever extra mile to get done. And that was really true for us on Bartlett. Because all of us are parents. And all of us have other jobby jobs and performance gigs. And we said, ‘Okay bring the kids to set.’ This is a family gig. We get it. And we would work around that. I would leave set around 3 everyday and go pick my daughter up from school, drop her off at home and come back to do more shooting at night. And if you aren’t able to look in the mirror and say what you do matters [to you] you might want to be able to find the thing that does. And it’s easy to say it and hard to do it and I have tons of empathy. 

PoG: You mentioned it in passing. You were involved in the relaunch of The Electric Company on PBS. What can you tell me about that?

Anthony Veneziale: Absolutely. Like most things in my life it came out of the seed of Freestyle Love Supreme. We were doing a off-Broadway run at this beautiful theater called the Ars Nova which is on 54th Street and they just expanded to a new theater down at the Greenwich House, but they will still have the 54th St. theater. We were doing a run there and a friend of the show knew that The Electric Company and some of the people around Sesame Workshop were looking for inspiration around relaunching The Electric Company and this was very early and just throwing some concepts around. And they brought the main creators to our show and afterwards they were like ‘This is what our show is. You doing what you just did up there for Freestyle Love Supreme is exactly the findings that we have around a lot of educational outreach that makes sense for kids to want to learn how to codify language.

So hip-hop, in essence, is this beautiful way to word-chunk. Find chunks of words that have similarities that then make you in your brain say ‘Oh, so these things are like these things.’ And that’s exactly how hip-hop works. And that’s exactly how the human brain that’s developing to learn language actually works. It doesn’t work by memorizing every letter and lining up all the letters. We kind of threw that out the window a long time ago. It’s by codefying. It’s seeing “EE” together and understanding that it sounds like this and “CH” together. And if that isn’t what hip-hop is, right?!? That’s exactly what you are doing, you are grabbing onto those word chunks. And so we started working with them and I had been a teacher for a long time, wo we sort of built out this understanding very early on that this would be the perfect tool to use in this fun way for disenfranchised readers. So kids that don’t see themselves as having the ability or access to reading.

It was super cool. And obviously the original series was a big influence on all of us who were working on it. And we also didn’t want to screw it up. So there was something in the room where we were like ‘this has better be good because the bar is super high.’

PoG: Talk about life coming full circle!

Anthony Veneziale: Totally! Totally!  

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Official Synopsis: 

Ad man Roger is desperate to quit his job and follow his dream of becoming a full-time musician. But first, he must correct a year’s worth of bad decisions by making up with his bitter ex-partner (and ex-lover), outwitting his manic boss and winning the pitch of a lifetime. This satirical comedy — featuring original songs by Anthony Veneziale — co-stars Utkarsh Ambudkar and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Bartlett is now available on Amazon Prime Video and Vimeo on Demand.

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