#books in media

[chrisery-business]

my biggest issue with the httyd live action-and just about any live action reboot is that it seems that the live action adaptations are being made to make the original “better”? like, so many people talk about a live action spiderverse, a live action hercules, a live action PRINCE OF EGYPT (dont piss me OFF.)-like animation is a beautiful work of art, and for some reason putting real people and cgi in it is supposed to be an “upgrade”? im probably being that friend that’s too woke or whatever, but i just think it’s so disrespectful to act like something that takes so much time and effort and energy is immediately considered as lower because it is animated. animation is beautiful, and it is one of the most heartfelt art forms there are, and erasing that for the sake of a cash grab is downright degrading to animation as a medium.

[wanologic]

sorry danny, sam will never think you’re cool

[shyjusticewarrior]

Two things can be and are true at once.

Robin Jason was a sweet, kind kid who cared about victims. He also had righteous rage and violent tendencies towards those he thought deserved it.

Being Robin gave him magic and as Robin he shattered a man's collarbone with no remorse.

[hkthatgffan]

The image used in the background of the Gravity Falls logo HAS BEEN FOUND!!

It's located in France!!

I made a thread on Twitter explaining the full story and how I even asked Ian Worrel and Alex Hirsch about it, but lemme run down quickly how it was found and where it is!

After 3 years of searching with some friends on and off, we had no real luck. I've been working on a video about it for a while but decided to try one more time. My friend @trickengf suggested looking at international logos as they may have more of the image available and sure enough...we found logos like the Japanese and Russian GF logo had more visible detail of the image.

From that, Tricken made a remake of the image and used it to find it. He ended up finding the source at about 3AM for me, lol!

My friend Fried Oreos then confirmed the image was old enough to fit the criteria of pre GF pilot, by determining the image was on the Textures website it was sourced from since 2008!

Then, my friend Alex M managed to buy the HD image and we were able to analyze its metadata for more info!

Turns out, the image, called "LandscapeMountains0009," was taken by a Nikon D70 camera on April 18, 2007!

THE GRAVITY FALLS LOGO IMAGE IS ALMOST 18 YEARS OLD!!

From there, we began looking for the location. The meta data had no location, but other images taken around the same time showed signs of maybe the location being in Europe.

After over a day of searching, Tricken, Alex M and Oreos FOUND IT!!

The location of the image is a mountain range near the town of Sers, France...near the border with Spain.

Exact coordinates of the closest viewable angle of the image is 42°54'23.2"N 0°06'05.6"E

This is a major discovery and one I cannot believe we did. While this search was started by me in 2021 with some friends, it was TrickenGF, Alex M and Fried Oreos who deserve all the credit for this discovery! They were the geniuses who tracked all of this down and were able to connect the dots to get to this point.

You guys are amazing and I am beyond grateful for all of this.

Finding this image means that fans can now recreate the Gravity Falls logo as they want with anything they want. For example, Tricken made this for me using the image :D

Or, you can do this, lol

We now have it!

For 12 years as we looked at the Gravity Falls logo...we were in reality looking at a mountain in France...NOT Oregon!

So, I guess this is a major W for France but sorry, Pacific Northwest, Gravity Falls is actually French, lol!

I still can't believe we found this. I'm so happy :P

[prokopetz]

Tumblr: Isn't it funny how Japanese light novels have such improbably long titles? Isn't it weird?

English literature for most of the 17th–19th Centuries:

[Image description – A photograph of a book published in 1810, whose title reads, in full: "A Reviving Cordial for a Sin-Sick Despairing Soul, in the Time of Temptation, Being an Account of the Miraculous Preservation of the Author’s Bodily Life From Many Imminent Dangers; and of the Way in Which the Spirit of God Effected the Deliverance Of His Soul From the State of Nature to the State of Grace. To Which Is Subjoined, the Only Refuge of a Troubled Soul, in the Time of Tribulation and Affliction; or, The Mystery of the Apple-Tree, Explained and Laid Open, in Two Discourses From Cant. ii. 3", by the Rev. James Barry, Minister of the Gospel.]

[myfootyrthroat]

School: Teaches you something for a week with historical background, context, effects, and outcomes.

One TikToker: Tells you it's fake while doing a bad contour.

Some of y'all: SCHOOL LIED?!

[nekhcore]

HEY YOU!

Yeah, you! Are you trans? Do you like reading books? Or watching movies?

Do you like media about trans men/transmasculine characters but don't know where to find it?

That's sooo crazy because I have this little spreadsheet I'm working on where I'm trying to document all media with protagonists/major characters who are FTM or transmasculine.

The spreadsheet currently has 400+ entries spread across the following categories:

Books

Manga

Memoirs and non-fiction

Movies

TV Shows

Graphic novels / Comics

Webcomics

Audio dramas

Books and movies are also sorted by:

Which character is trans (MC, love interest, antagonist, etc)

If the trans character is POC

The trans character's sexuality (Because I saw lots of transhet guys sad about only being able to find gay romances)

If the author/actor is also trans (if we know for sure)

It's free to use, and free to add to as well! Editing permissions are on, and I check on the spreadsheet every now and then to make sure everything is in order and to clean up.

If you know something that isn't on the list, please add it! You don't have to fill in every single column, but fill it to the best of your abilities.

If you don't want to use the big ass long link below, you can also use: bit.ly/FTM-protags

I made this because I want it to be a community resource. So even if you're not a trans guy or transmasculine person, please reblog!

[emeryleewho]

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got paid to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

Update: This is literally just a thought exercise to help you be more intentional with how you critique media. I'm not enforcing this as some divine rule that must be followed any time you have an opinion on fiction, and I'm definitely not saying that you have to structure every single sentence in a review to contain zero negative phrases. I'm just saying that I repurposed a rule we had at that specific reviewer to be a helpful tool to check myself when writing critiques now. If you don't want to use the tool, literally no one (especially not me) can or wants to force you to use it. As with all advice, it is a totally reasonable and normal thing to not have use for every piece of it that exists from random strangers on the internet. Use it to whatever extent it helps you or not at all.

[phantom-shell]

The archivist is in for a VERY long statement

[jesncin]

Happy National Coming Out Day! It's been about half a year since our middle grade graphic novel, Lunar Boy, released! Today we want to reflect on the concept of Coming Out, and how it's fictionalized in media.

Check out Lunar Boy wherever american graphic novels are sold, or check it out at a library! All the support means a lot with getting stories like this out there.

[evydraws]

"It seemed as if the whole, awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion."

Bram Stoker's Dracula | portfolio | prints

[ale-arro]

been going a little bit insane about this sentence from Ace by Angela Chen for the past week

[moraymiso]

the strangest thing to me about the BSD fandom is the fact that the vast majority of people in it are dazai fans, while also consistently assuming the absolute worst of him, disregarding the circumstances around his actions and giving him no grace or consideration of his situation whatsoever.

there's no doubt dazai is a bad person in many ways. he did plenty of unjustifiable, inexcusable things. he's pathologically manipulative with a totally skewed moral compass, most of which was undoubtedly brought on by his upbringing in the mafia. but at the same time, i see such a huge number of people taking that and somehow ending up with - and vehemently defending - this idea that he's a remorseless, indifferent, innately cruel person by nature?

are we forgetting this is the same dazai who was forced to false-witness a murder at fourteen years old? the same dazai who already wracked up numerous suicide attempts barely out of his pre-teens?the same dazai who was referred to by everyone around him as a 'demon' at fifteen years old? the same dazai consistently described as having grief-filled, empty expressions and detached, vacant reactions to practically everything when he was so young? the same dazai that oda described as "a child crying in the dark, alone, left to fend for himself with a hole in his heart as large as the world itself"?

that dazai is an indifferent, heartless, innately psychopathic person? really? i'm not convinced.

[shyjusticewarrior]

[laddersofsweetmisery]

I don't see enough people mourning over the slow death of physical media. And I don't just mean TV shows, video games, or movies--which don't even get me started about how we don't really 'own' anything anymore. It includes notes, journals, and letters to one another...so much of our history is lost when we lose a password, a website goes down, a file/hardware is corrupted, or a platform disappears. History that doesn't seem important until you no longer have access to it. Physical media does a lot for memory recall. How many memories will we lose because we don't have something tangible to tie it back to? Something to hold in our hands and stir up those memories we thought were once lost? Sometimes I wonder what the difference between burning a book and losing access to physical media is when someone can pull the plug and remove your access so easily.