#anyway csm in general I really enjoyed actually

[livteracts]

livvvv should i finish watching csm😓😓

YES 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 YES

[thechibilitwick]

3 19 35 for the artist ask game hiii hi chibi hiiiii

omg hi vin hi 🥹 ty for the ask ok time to ramble

3. mannn that's tough but i'd probably say these four. shidou one cuz it's a piece that i put more thought into than i usually do, souda because i just love him and this is one of the pieces i think i did well with colors, this miku one for the same reason i just think it looks sick, and then the little milgram get together cuz i kinda cooked on the composition and atmosphere and i love milgram slice of life au (i'd also say my most recent piece too just cuz i spent a lot of time on it lolz)

actually i don't think i'll ever properly post these but i made these for art projects and i really like them since they turned out nicely (tho one isn't actually finished) and they were really fun to make!!

19. i really like cartoon-ish styles, styles that are really vibrant and colorful, or just styles that i think are super neat and nice (ie csm, mp100, p&swg, mononoke, etc., and a handful of artists) (like you omg i love your style so much uehghhhh) so i either subconsciously think of those as inspo when making art. or i just have the general idea of either "thoughtful color composition" or "burning your retinas" (/j). as for what i specifically draw tho it depends but it usually comes down to seeing something and then wanting to combine it with my interests. like combining vocaloid songs with characters i like, or even just doing something irl and being like "wow it'd be fun if ___ was doing this too!!" (and for oc art which i've made very little of i simply like making characters based off food :3)

35. probably don't be scared of sharing your art with others because more often than not it'll really help you as an artist

like i think the main reason my confidence grew in art was because i had found a circle of artists i could share my work with and then receive support from. it's such an uplifting and positive feeling to know that to another person your art matters, and it also made me want to support others in return! like nothing makes me smile more than seeing comments from others or being able to support other fellow artists, that's the beauty of art. ik this is kinda cheesy and basic but like genuinely, being supported and being able to support others feels so nice 😭

anyways hope you enjoyed my ramblings :,3 apologies if anything is incoherent or messy

[kafkaoftherubble]

Idk if you particularly care about the Crunchyroll Anime Awards but voting opened yesterday (https://www.crunchyroll.com/animeawards/vote) and the nominees for some of the awards are so confusing.

With the amount of cool anime that came out last year I’m confused on why there’s a lack of diversity in the options. Look, I loved JJK S2, but why is it in nearly every category 😭. I’m also reluctant to let MAPPA get any kind of a win due the horrid scheduling conditions the animators were put under.

It just feels like the people that were deciding the nominees were like “Oh yeah CSM, Oshi no Ko, and Demon Slayer were pretty popular, just throw it in there!” Also didn’t the CSM anime come out and end in 2022, why is it here?

Also as a Hells Paradise manga fan, I’m confused on why the anime adaptation is even anywhere NEAR these awards. Best opening I understand, but it was a show that clearly suffered from MAPPA overwork and then taking on too many IPs. It’s just clogging up nominee spaces at this point.

Yo, I forgot that it's time for that Anime Award thing again! I remembered the Game Awards but not this, damn. SHould we vote too?

Oh yea, 2023 was such a banger.

I kinda expected JJK S2 to show up in a lot of categories, especially since I think for a lot of them, it does seem rather deserving to be there... even if it takes away the votes for other work. I think about it this way: is it fair to deny someone from being a candidate in a race even though they qualify, just because they are very popular? For now, I lean negative to this.

Of course! Deserving or not is a matter of subjective taste! To that, I am happy to concede, haha!

That said, since the Anime Award is a popularity award, I think voters like us should try to balance out the votes cast for JJK to mitigate the possible expense of other deserving anime.

I don't remember if Crunchyroll would show the percentage of votes for transparency purposes when the voting closes, but I think it's useful to do that. If JJK wins, we know it's because of its meteoric popularity, not because its competitors suck. Then we can see how, despite the competition, some anime managed to score a pretty startling number of votes.

I think focusing on the statistics cuts straight to the heart of acknowledgment and appreciation of an art form, even if it lacks the glory of actually winning the first prize. But hey, it's low-stakes stuff in the end. It ain't the general or presidential election, innit? 😂

If only we could do rank-choice voting...

---

I also do not understand why Chainsaw Man is here. I also thought it would not be counted because it was from last-last year.

I kinda think Oshi no Ko deserves to be around, though!

Demon Slayer... has been like a goddamn mainstay for years now, jesus. I'm gonna refrain from opining about it precisely because I don't enjoy Demon Slayer, so anything I say may be inseparable from this personal bias against the work, ahahhaha!

---

MAPPA taking so many projects shows another issue now that you mentioned it: it's taking up a lotta places with different projects too! If you don't want MAPPA to win, because you want to punish them for the way they treated their animators, your choices will become so much more limited. It's not a full-blown MAPPAのpoly yet, but there is a nascent emergence of it. Brrrrr.

Just taking up so many of the candidacies—via their surplus products—increases the probability of MAPPA emerging as the shadow victor no matter what anime won. Well, well, well. Slick move, MAPPA.

Anyway, I'm spitballing here, but...

I kinda think that it's high time awards minimize the brand of the studio and start amplifying the names of certain teams contributing to the art, like... the lead animators and the director. Ya know, "Director X and Their Team" instead of "MAPPA studio."

And award categories should really expand beyond genre or whatever the host makes up. Some of their categories even seem meaningless to me, like "best continuing series." What's there to celebrate about a long-running series? Why can't a series just compete with other series, regardless of how long it ran, as long as it's within that year?

Instead, wouldn't it be better if we create categories for "best animator" or "best scene" or, hey! There's an existing one! "Best Art Direction!" But instead of letting "Anime X, Studio Y" be the rep, we actually credit the name of the lead animators et al., and then the actual scene within the anime itself?

That way, even a show with fewer fans could still get recognized for that show's sick artistic achievements (if applicable), and the people behind it are at the forefront of said recognition. While we as fans can still shower credits to a big-production show—since it's got a lot of really good stuff—with minimal "accidental plaudits" to terrible studio execs.

I kinda... just think that if award shows are meant to celebrate and acknowledge the medium of anime, why not really cut to the heart of it?

Who are we celebrating for achievements, and for what?

---

I did not read Hell's Paradise as a manga, hee hee. Don't jump on me!

So, with nothing to compare, I liked the anime enough. I'm actually not bespoke about sakuga and composition and whatnot; I'm as unsophisticated as they come, ahahah! I love the monsters and the flowers and stuff!

I love the story and the philosophical mix between Buddhism and Daoism. It's so rad. I also really admire Sagirin! And I like Gabimaru too.

All these alone actually make me like the anime /scratches head

...Yea I'm shallow like that! HAHAHAHHAHAHA!

PLUTO WHERE YOU AT LEMME LAVISH YOU WITH VOTES YOU BETTER BE IN THERE

---

Oh, the length of this reply qualifies so...

Thank you for reading my ramble!

[brittainrhea]

Ghouli

- Ghouli looks so cool.

- Those girls were slicing and dicing. Damn! Calm down!!

- "You see what I want you to see"

- "Frozen on a stranger's bed" That's not creepy at all.

-Omg the three-piece business casual set of satin pajamas have returned!! I can't remember who on here talked about her always wearing it and referred to it as a three-piece business casual set of satin pajamas BUT I always scream "three-piece business casual satin pajamas!" EVERY. TIME. It makes me happy. Then I think about somebody saying she was a cozy bitch. Yeah...that makes me happy. So happy. Geez, how many times can I say three-piece business casual satin pajamas? So many times...so many...

-Scully is looking pretty badass walking through that house in her three-piece business casual satin pajamas holding a gun. Such a badass.

-They're being followed...that's not good.

-William is watching them on the Chimera.

- Bob! Go get your coffee!

- It's breath smelled like cinnamon?

- A dream just like Scully. Okay, so these girls were both Jackson's girlfriends and they didn't know what his house looked like? I mean you would think they would have seen it at some point. I guess it depends on how long they've known each other. Anywho, the one said her parents didn't approve of her having a boyfriend so did she mean a boyfriend in general or didn't approve of Jackson. She says "they're really lame but he's cool." Kind of makes me wonder if she was meaning they didn't approve of him specifically.

- "Kids would get stoned on it in the summer. Not me." Mulder's face and the way he throws his hands up at this comment was pretty funny. He's like yeah right...lol!

- Van de Kamp. Scully's face says it all.

- Woah, people still use the steering wheel and pedals on games?! What?! I know this is not the important part of the scene but I haven't seen anyone use those in a long time.

- I just want to hug Scully. Did you see her face?

- "You're trying to find answers to questions nobody else is asking." Well yeah...you don't understand why but it's kind of important for them to know this stuff.

- A murder suicide to me would seem a bit strange unless there were known issues with the family which I don't remember them saying anything about throughout this episode so...yeah...it seems a bit strange that the detective was so quick to accept that.

- Seriously Scully, seeing you like this just makes me sad and want to give you a big hug.

- I like that they had his room decorated in space stuff. Nice touch.

- I like that Mulder goes full detective.

- These DoD peeps are dicks.

- The first time I watched Scully's speech in the morgue...it was sad but I just didn't feel much of anything which for me was incredibly weird. However, the second time I watched it, I connected with it more.

"I wish I could have been there to ease your pain."

That part got me. Out of everything she says that part really got me. Gillian Anderson did a wonderful job which is nothing new. She's awesome. Well I think she is. Have you seen her in The Fall? So awesome.

Both times I watched this scene when she says "if you are William...this is what I'd say." Seemed so weird. So strange for her to say. I just feel like if that line was cut out, it would have been better. If she said "If you are William...I'm sorry." I would have been more immersed in the moment because both times I watched this as soon as she says "this is what I'd say." I immediately was pulled from the scene. Something about that just bothered me. My brain was just like why would you say it like that?

-Poor Scully...Poor Mulder... You can tell this is really getting to him, he's just trying to hide it for Scully.

- Mulder is right. She doesn't need to apologize for anything. She tried to do what was best for him.

- "Is this a message for me? Or am I sending a message to you?" After watching this episode, I'd like to know that answer too.

- "Did you take that from his room?" You can hear in his voice that he's struggling to keep it together.

- ”Do you like windmills?”  My brain immediately started thinking about the “I like turtles” kid.  

- "I like this one." Scully is so sweet.

- DoD douchebags here to ruin everything. Good job with the soda, Mulder!

- Skinner, come on dude. You're so lucky that I like you. I know you're in a tough spot and you try to help Mulder and Scully but damn dude! OMG! CSM, why must you show up?! I'm completely okay with not seeing you. I really hate you now. I didn't like you before but I could at least watch your scenes without getting completely pissed. You've gone to the next level of douchebag and your complete being just angers me.

- "It's cold and it smells." Skinner don't be a baby. Your warning is a little late dude. Skinner stop talking...you're making this worse. Mulder must think they're to blame for William's death. So sad. Skinner definitely feels terrible now. Maybe he should have told them this crap sooner. Well maybe he didn't know all of it yet.

So...CSM is using Mulder and Scully to find William?  And does Skinner not realize this? I feel like Skinner would have really tried convince them to stop searching for William if he knew this.  It seems strange...he know so much or appears to know so much.

- "It's an alternate reality Fox doesn't exist in coffee shops."

- CSM and Project Crossroads. Another experiment that Scully was unknowingly a subject of...well I guess we don't know for sure yet. Scully didn't seem to have much of a reaction to finding out that she was possibly the subject of another experiment thanks to Ol' Smokey. I know her main concern is William however she was just told that she was experimented on again. I would think she would be visibly pissed, upset, something!

- Where is he now? Well Scully they decided to make your son into kind of an ass so he's going to hang out with his two girlfriends. You know the ones he decided to test his powers on. Possibly traumatizing them by making them see the other as a monster which made them attack and almost kill each other.

- Okay...the first time I watched this whole Jackson at the hospital scene...I was so pissed that they made him seem like such a douche that I didn't notice some of his expressions when he was apologizing to them and explaining what was going on with him. I didn't pay close enough attention to how he was saying stuff and to what he was saying either. Obviously all this makes a big difference when watching this scene. I originally thought it seemed like he didn't care about what had happened with everything. To me it seemed like he was scared that these people were trying to kill him but that was about it.

Now the second time...once I had time to cool off...I noticed that he did seem bothered by what he had done, what happened to his family, and he seemed really confused and scared. He seemed like he was in shock after all this which is understandable.  He still seems like an ass which is disappointing.

- Jackson...you need a haircut...it would be a lot easier for you to escape if you could actually see where you are going.

- Again, Ghouli looks cool. Too bad it isn't real. What a shame.

- WILLIAM GET OUT THERE AND TALK TO YOUR MOTHER! I was so pissed at this part and I literally yelled this at the tv.

- I liked the final scene between Scully and Jackson. It seems so weird calling him Jackson and not William. I wish he would have just shown his face and actually talked to them before driving off. Was that too much to ask? Seeing Mulder and Scully watching the video...seeing him and hearing him was a very sweet moment. But I feel like they should have tried to go after him. It seems more like something they would have done... well at least it seems like something they would have done back in the day. I felt like Scully would have realized that was him before he drove off. I know she thought something was strange but it just seemed like with their knowledge of his power that she would have put that together.  I mean they just discussed it.

- To be honest, I was super pissed and incredibly disappointed after I watched the episode the first time. I was so excited to see this episode in particular because we all knew we would see William. We would actually get to see what he's become. I was so pissed that they made him seem like such an ass. I felt like I did at the end of MSIII. I tell you when I realized where they were going with the En Ami episode with CSM and Scully...I freaked especially since I've read the theories about it before and that was the one thing I said I really hoped they did not include in the show and guess what they did it!

Anyway...I guess my disappointment was with what they did with William not so much the episode as a whole because we had some great Mulder and Scully moments.

I enjoyed the episode more the second time I watched it. As I said before once I had time to cool off and not go into it being super hyped. I'm still not happy with the choices they made with William. His overall appearance irritated me. Seriously dude...cut your hair...if not cut your hair then get it out of your face...style it differently. Just do something different...geebus... The whole two girlfriends thing and testing his powers on them...I really just don't like it. I know he apologizes for what happened on the Chimera but he doesn't seem to see anything wrong with having two girlfriends that knew nothing about the other. The whole going to the hospital to see them and so on...ugh... It makes him look like an ass.

I feel like we were left with more unanswered questions that we will more than likely never get the answers to.  

I’m still on the fence about this episode...I liked it better the second time but I’m not sure I can say that I necessarily thought it was a good episode.  I just didn’t hate it. I don’t know...I felt like this episode should have been so much more.  

Other random thoughts....

Scully, why didn’t you seem upset about being a part of another experiment thanks to Ol’ Smokey? It seemed like they just acted like Mulder didn’t say anything about it. Why bring it up?

The Van de Kamps are now in Virginia? In like some fancy ass house. In season 9 weren't they on some farm in Wyoming. That's a major lifestyle change. Will we find out what happened with that? They were in the middle of nowhere before but now they're in some fancy neighborhood. Very weird.

I wish the Ghouli was real. It seems like a waste of a monster for it to just be something Jackson made up in his head. It looked pretty cool. They could have made him some failed experiment from the eugenics program. Like some branch of doctors working on the program really messed shit up. Lol!! I was really bummed that it wasn't some badass monster.

I noticed that both times Mulder saw William dead he kind of stares at his face and then suddenly looks away like he can't handle looking at him. First time when he goes upstairs to find Scully and sees them putting him in the body bag. The second time when he's hugging Scully in the morgue. So sad.

Ghouli.net was cool.  When Jackson said he made everything up, does he mean just everything about the Ghouli? Or did he make up the stories about the kid seeing the red haired woman too?

They need to rename this episode 'Mulder and Scully need a hug.'

[horsebitesfence]

One year Sober – Sophie Helf interview

How is New York ? We know from Twitter and your guest spot on the Death Panel Podcast that you spent a year working toward moving back there, and you made it!   How has it been going so far?   

– It’s been wonderful. The past year was incredibly difficult – going through surgeries, relearning to walk – but I knew I wanted to move here so did whatever I could to heal up quickly. So far I’m quite happy here! It’s nice to be able to see all my friends, go where I want, explore different opportunities. Simple things feel so good – having my own room, living with nice people, ‘hustling’ for work (ha!). Not a fan of the weather though.

We really love your piece for the Outline, where you talk about inspo porn, being a little worm  and how you love your legs.  We I hear you’re getting new prosthetics –  how do they compare, and might they lower the chance of another infection? That must have made the move that much harder (and more inspirational).

–– Thank you! My new prosthetics will actually be vacuum-powered – every time I take a step the ends of my legs sort of get ‘sucked’ into the prosthetic, so to speak. Everything is custom made, from the liners to the sockets, so it’ll be a lot harder for my legs to chafe. The infection was miserable but has healed up pretty well so far. Sometimes the leg still hurts but not nearly as badly as it did before.

They sound cool and we hope it goes on healing really well.  

You’ve been tweeting about using the subway since you’ve been back there.  From here it seems like New York’s public transport infrastructure is pretty run down –  kind of hostile for users in general and especially for disabled users.   Has that been your experience?  

–– The infrastructure can be pretty shit, depending on which station you’re at. The one near my place is just a set of stairs leading underground that I have to carefully waddle down (though I’m getting better at that). Most people here stick to the ‘keep right’ rule, which is nice, but there have been occasions when I’ve had to dodge someone and almost fallen down. At the larger stations with various train lines there are elevators and escalators, but if you’re at a smaller one it’s probably just stairs. Good exercise, I suppose, but for people with mobility issues it’s incredibly unfriendly.

Sort it out NYC. You’ve lived in London, SF and New York;  how do the three cities compare in terms of transport, access, attitudes? 

–– The Bay Area actually has a fantastic subway system for disabled people. Every MUNI and BART station has an elevator and the trains can easily accommodate someone in a wheelchair. London stations were squeaky clean and most stations had elevators, even at the farther-out ones; I took it for granted at the time, but looking back it was very well put together. New York definitely has the most unfriendly transport system, but from what I’ve heard there have been rallies to make it more accessible, which I’m hoping leads to something better.

Yeah, London’s public transport infrastructure’s pretty good, but there are just so many people, and not everyone is good at keeping left or moving carefully.  It doesn’t help that the UK is one of the few countries where you’re supposed to pass on the left side, whereas London is such a global city that many people naturally tend toward the right.   

It’s better not to travel at rush hour if you can help it, but that’s not always possible, and it’s also pretty restrictive. London Transport now do a ‘please offer me a seat’ badge, but we also need ones that say ‘don’t push’, ‘give me space’, ‘keep your distance’ . Or maybe just ‘keep the fuck away from me.’ And more ‘keep left’ signs – it makes such a big difference. 

–– London transport gets so incredibly crowded, more than in New York or San Francisco, I think – I definitely understand why you’d avoid rush hour! I generally try not to go places during rush hour; seeing as I’ve mostly been working from home, it’s been easy to avoid it. I’m hoping to get a 9-to-5 job, though, and am not sure how I’ll deal with the crush. Stay posted for developments!

Yes!  Best of luck!  And best of health insurance. 

One of the many things to love about your Twitter is the way you tweet on MH stuff, and meds, and coffee, and coffee on meds. You also tweet about sobriety. What’s it like being at NY parties sober? 

–– I’ve definitely had my mental health issues in the past, which led me to getting sober. It’s the best thing I’ve done for myself, I think; my mental health, though not perfect, is doing better without the guilt I used to get when I’d wake up after a messy night out. I don’t really mind people drinking around me (or doing coke in some cases – oof) and people have been really respectful of my decision not to participate. I feel really lucky that hardly anyone’s pressed me on why I got sober; if someone does, I just say ‘I felt like it’ and don’t go into anything deeper because I don’t really owe anyone an explanation.

Yes to respectfulness, and to not owing.  And congratulations on a year sober. 

[One Horse Bite discloses: I spent years feeling shame about MH stuff, being in denial and trying to ‘act normal’, which in hindsight has had distorting life-effects.  I held out against doing psych meds for a really long time, even though they’re almost free, thanks to the NHS, what’s left of it �� maybe that’s why they don’t get pushed on people here so hard.  After my accident, I finally gave myself permission to try meds, maybe because I felt like it gave me a concrete reason to need them, one that carries less stigma than mental illness.  And then I still wasn’t ok!  Both due to the accident and because I was already not-ok, pre-accident. The accident was the last straw really; like I had no spare capacity to handle it. Invisible Strings / @M_Kelter, who tweets on autism and depression, suggests that in place of ‘comorbidity’, we might use the term ‘meanwhile’. Meanwhile, I had to begin to address the MH stuff I’d already been carrying, and admit to myself I’d been carrying it all that time, as well as with the accident. Meds were helpful with that, even tho it took a bit trial and error to find the right ones;  for most of last year I was on what seemed to help at first, and then made me increasingly and dangerously disinhibited. There were – incidents, including but not limited to shouting ‘walk left’ at people on the underground. Still no ragrets – sort of; once I found the right meds, or the more-right ones, anyway, I kind of wished I’d started on them years ago, though it’s important to stress that nothing has helped so much as finally having stable housing for the first time in my adult life, post-accident. Also to note that my being in a state of ‘invisible homelessness’ at the time of the accident was a key causal factor in the accident itself. Meanwhile –. ]

Sophie, you went to art school, but studied design rather than fine art, and are now a coder; so while you’re art-world networked, hopefully you’re a bit less subject to the horrid vicissitudes of all that. How did you get into coding?  

–– I was at Central St Martins from 2012 to 2015, a couple of years after they moved into that awful Granary Building.  Very strange being there; they insisted that the great corridor in the centre was a space for collaborating, but you had to get express permission from tutors or higher-ups to put things there, and – I hated this – your tap-card could only get you into your studio.  So if you were a design student and wanted to go into the fine art studios, you’d have to borrow a fine art student’s card to get in. It really kept all the different programmes separate from each other and discouraged collaboration in the end.

–– I got into coding after coming back to California from CSM without a Bay Area design/art network, without any idea how to get a job. I needed a portfolio site to present my work on but hated all the templated ones (Cargo Collective etc.), so decided to learn a bit of HTML and CSS to build one myself. To my surprise, I really enjoyed it, so started learning JavaScript as well. Choosing whether to professionally pursue coding instead of design was a huge decision to make, but eventually I decided ‘fuck it’, successfully applied to and attended a coding bootcamp. 

Now I do front-end development, which focuses on the look and feel of a website and how a user interacts with it. It’s been interesting navigating the different splits and rivulets of ‘the coding world’, so to speak; there’s ‘the tech community’, which I do feel separate from as I tend to view coding just as something I do and not an entire lifestyle. Code can intersect with art and design in tons of different ways and I do like Twitter as a tool to keep up with some of the people I admire. 

Can we be really prurient and ask what you meant when you tweeted about missing mid-2000s SF ?  

–– I like this question! I guess it was a tweet that was sort of mourning what San Francisco used to be like back before it was stuffed and crawling with tech people. I was in high school in the mid-2000’s and specifically remember San Francisco as – scuzzier, I guess; still kind of eerie and loose and a little more dangerous. I was a little shit back then and spent a lot of time at a park called Dolores Park, which used to be crusty as hell and filled with naked hula-hooping people and boozy high schoolers passing around bad weed (including me and my friends). Now it’s squeaky clean and gets stuffed with frat kids on the weekends. I’ll admit that I do love to complain about current SF a little too much. Cities do change, of course, but it makes me sad that SF is so incredibly unaffordable and losing much of the weird, wonky character it used to be known for. It does still constantly smell like weed and piss though, which is oddly comforting.

Is that what made you so keen to get out of there, aside from the glut of other coders, and the fact that it’s your home town – or was it more about getting to NY  ?

–– Honestly I think you really hit the nail on the head re: tech people and hometown. It’s a tiny city and I felt like I’d explored every corner, done everything I wanted to there, and got a little tired of bumping into parents of kids I went to high school with while I was buying a Diet Coke at the grocery store. And yes, I really wanted to go to New York – a lot of my friends live here, and it’s a whole new city to get to know and explore. I’ve been here for a couple of months and feel like I’ve seen a tiny droplet of what’s out there, which I like. And, truthfully, it’s cheaper both transport-wise and rent-wise, which is important while I’m freelancing while looking for a job, and will continue to be nice once I’m salaried – more to save for retirement, health insurance and occasional fun things. I’ve wanted to live here since middle school so it’s nice to, you know, be here. I like it a lot.

Sophie, thank you!  Enjoy New York.  

Thank you for interviewing, this was very fun!

S

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