#doing commissions or having a big social media following : D

[ronanceautistic]

What app I think the Stranger Things characters would have the most screen time on:

Mike - Twitter. That boy has Twitter Blue and 95% of his tweets are quote tweets.

Will - Instagram. He follows a lot of art accounts, posts art himself. He wants to do commissions at some point.

Dustin - He is someone who refused to use TikTok until he was convinced into it and the algorithm put him on the nerdy D&D side and now he’s addicted.

Lucas - Lucas isn’t a big doomscroller, he posts stuff occasionally but he’s not the kind of guy to spend hours on his phone. So, audiobooks. Or, Pokemon Go. If people still use that.

Nancy - She’s too busy for it to doomscroll and she barely uses social media either, when she does it’s usually to do with the newspaper. The most used is some kind of Match 3 game she goes on when she’s on public transport or just waiting around.

Jonathan - Spotify. He treats his phone like a walkman, it’s just Spotify

Steve - He’s not big on social media so it’s iMessage because he spends most of his time messaging Robin. They probably text each other three feet away from each other at work.

Erica - If kids still use Snapchat then it’s that. If they don’t then it’s TikTok. I have a vivid picture of her spending all her free time on Snapchat but honestly is it even still a thing.

Max - Youtube I think. She’s watching those long ass video essays.

Robin - Another TikTok user. Again, criticised it at first but the algorithm sucked her in. And sure, Nancy doesn’t have a TikTok but she’s absolutely watching Robin scroll through her fyp for two hours a day. Oh or Duolingo because she has like a thousand day streak she refuses to lose even though she is absolutely too fluent for it at this point.

Argyle - Subway Surfers. I have nothing else to say he just screams Subway Surfers.

Eddie - I have no clue. Probably Reddit.

[mcmansionhell]

Coronagrifting: A Design Phenomenon

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled content to bring you a critical essay on the design world. I promise you that this will also be funny. 

This morning, the design website Dezeen tweeted a link to one of its articles, depicting a plexiglass coronavirus shield that could be suspended above dining areas, with the caption “Reader comment: ‘Dezeen, please stop promoting this stupidity.’”

This, of course, filled many design people, including myself, with a kind of malicious glee. The tweet seemed to show that the website’s editorial (or at least social media) staff retained within themselves a scintilla of self-awareness regarding the spread a new kind of virus in its own right: cheap mockups of COVID-related design “solutions” filling the endlessly scrollable feeds of PR-beholden design websites such as Dezeen, ArchDaily, and designboom. I call this phenomenon: Coronagrifting. 

I’ll go into detail about what I mean by this, but first, I would like to presenet some (highly condensed) history. 

From Paper Architecture to PR-chitecture

Back in the headier days of architecture in the 1960s and 70s, a number of architectural avant gardes (such as Superstudio and Archizoom in Italy and Archigram in the UK) ceased producing, well, buildings, in favor of what critics came to regard as “paper architecture.” This “paper architecture” included everything from sprawling diagrams of megastructures, including cities that “walked” or “never stopped” - to playfully erotic collages involving Chicago’s Marina City. Occasionally, these theoretical and aesthetic explorations were accompanied by real-world productions of “anti-design” furniture that may or may not have involved foam fingers. 

Archigram’s Walking City (1964). Source.

Paper architecture, of course, still exists, but its original radical, critical, playful, (and, yes, even erotic) elements were shed when the last of the ultra-modernists were swallowed up by the emerging aesthetic hegemony of Postmodernism (which was much less invested in theoretical and aesthetic futurism) in the early 1980s. What remained were merely images, the production and consumption of which has only increased as the design world shifted away from print and towards the rapidly produced, easily digestible content of the internet and social media. 

Architect Bjarke Ingels’s “Oceanix” - a mockup of an ecomodernist, luxury city designed in response to rising sea levels from climate change. The city will never be built, and its critical interrogation amounts only to “city with solar panels that floats bc climate change is Serious”  - but it did get Ingels and his firm, BIG, a TED talk and circulation on all of the hottest blogs and websites. Meanwhile, Ingels has been in business talks with the right-wing climate change denialist president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro. (Image via designboom) 

Design websites are increasingly dominated by text and mockups from the desks of a firm’s public relations departments, facilitating a transition from the paper-architecture-imaginary to what I have begun calling “PR-chitecture.” In short, PR-chitecture is architecture and design content that has been dreamed up from scratch to look good on instagram feeds or, more simply, for clicks.  It is only within this substance-less, critically lapsed media landscape that Coronagrifting can prosper.

Coronagrifting: An Evolution

As of this writing, the two greatest offenders of Coronagrifting are Dezeen, which has devoted an entire section of its website to the virus (itself offering twelve pages of content since February alone) and designboom, whose coronavirus tag contains no fewer than 159 articles. 

Certainly, a small handful of these stories demonstrate useful solutions to COVID-related problems (such as this one from designboom about a student who created a mask prototype that would allow D/deaf and hard of hearing people to read lips) most of the prototypes and the articles about them are, for a lack of a better word, insipid. 

But where, you may ask, did it all start?

One of the easiest (and, therefore, one of the earliest) Coronagrifts involves “new innovative, health-centric designs tackling problems at the intersection of wearables and personal mobility,” which is PR-chitecture speak for “body shields and masks.” 

Wearables and Post-ables

The first example came from Chinese architect Sun Dayong, back at the end of February 2020, when the virus was still isolated in China. Dayong submitted to Dezeen a prototype of a full mask and body-shield that “would protect a wearer during a coronavirus outbreak by using UV light to sterilise itself.” The project was titled “Be a Bat Man.” No, I am not making this up. 

Screenshot of Dayong’s “Be a Batman” as seen on the Dezeen website. 

Soon after, every artist, architect, designer, and sharp-eyed PR rep at firms and companies only tangentially related to design realized that, with the small investment of a Photoshop mockup and some B-minus marketing text, they too could end up on the front page of these websites boasting a large social media following and an air of legitimacy in the field. 

By April, companies like Apple and Nike were promising the use of existing facilities for producing or supplying an arms race’s worth of slick-tech face coverings. Starchitecture’s perennial PR-churners like Foster + Partners and Bjarke Ingels were repping “3D-printed face shields”, while other, lesser firms promised wearable vaporware like “grapheme filters,” branded “skincare LED masks for encouraging self-development” and “solar powered bubble shields.” 

While the mask Coronagrift continues to this day, the Coronagrifting phenomenon had, by early March, moved to other domains of design. 

Consider the barrage of asinine PR fluff that is the “Public Service Announcement” and by Public Service Announcement, I mean “A Designer Has Done Something Cute to Capitalize on Information Meant to Save Lives.” 

Some of the earliest offenders include cutesy posters featuring flags in the shape of houses, ostensibly encouraging people to “stay home;” a designer building a pyramid out of pillows ostensibly encouraging people to “stay home”; and Banksy making “lockdown artwork” that involved covering his bathroom in images of rats ostensibly encouraging people to “stay home.” 

Lol. Screenshot from Dezeen. 

You may be asking, “What’s the harm in all this, really, if it projects a good message?” And the answer is that people are plenty well encouraged to stay home due to the rampant spread of a deadly virus at the urging of the world’s health authorities, and that these tone-deaf art world creeps are using such a crisis for shameless self promotion and the generation of clicks and income, while providing little to no material benefit to those at risk and on the frontlines.

Of course, like the mask coronagrift, the Public Service Announcement coronagrift continues to this very day. 

The final iteration of Post-able and Wearable Coronagrifting genres are what I call “Passive Aggressive Social Distancing Initiatives” or PASDIs. Many of the first PASDIs were themselves PSAs and art grifts, my favorite of which being the designboom post titled “social distancing applied to iconic album covers like the beatle’s abbey road.” As you can see, we’re dealing with extremely deep stuff here. 

However, an even earlier and, in many ways more prescient and lucrative grift involves “social distancing wearables.” This can easily be summarized by the first example of this phenomenon, published March 19th, 2020 on designboom: 

Never wasting a single moment to capitalize on collective despair, all manner of brands have seized on the social distancing wearable trend, which, again, can best be seen in the last example of the phenomenon, published May 22nd, 2020 on designboom:

We truly, truly live in Hell. 

Which brings us, of course, to living. 

“Architectural Interventions” for a “Post-COVID World”

As soon as it became clear around late March and early April that the coronavirus (and its implications) would be sticking around longer than a few months, the architectural solutions to the problem came pouring in. These, like the virus itself, started at the scale of the individual and have since grown to the scale of the city. (Whether or not they will soon encompass the entire world remains to be seen.) 

The architectural Coronagrift began with accessories (like the designboom article about 3D-printed door-openers that enable one to open a door with one’s elbow, and the Dezeen article about a different 3D-printed door-opener that enables one to open a door with one’s elbow) which, in turn, evolved into “work from home” furniture (”Stykka designs cardboard #StayTheF***Home Desk for people working from home during self-isolation”) which, in turn, evolved into pop-up vaporware architecture for first responders (”opposite office proposes to turn berlin's brandenburg airport into COVID-19 'superhospital'”), which, in turn evolved into proposals for entire buildings (”studio prototype designs prefabricated 'vital house' to combat COVID-19″); which, finally, in turn evolved into “urban solutions” aimed at changing the city itself (a great article summarizing and criticizing said urban solutions was recently written by Curbed’s Alissa Walker).

There is something truly chilling about an architecture firm, in order to profit from attention seized by a global pandemic, logging on to their computers, opening photoshop, and drafting up some lazy, ineffectual, unsanitary mockup featuring figures in hazmat suits carrying a dying patient (macabrely set in an unfinished airport construction site) as a real, tangible solution to the problem of overcrowded hospitals; submitting it to their PR desk for copy, and sending it out to blogs and websites for clicks, knowing full well that the sole purpose of doing so consists of the hope that maybe someone with lots of money looking to commission health-related interiors will remember that one time there was a glossy airport hospital rendering on designboom and hire them. 

Enough, already. 

Frankly, after an endless barrage of cyberpunk mask designs, social distancing burger king crowns, foot-triggered crosswalk beg buttons that completely ignore accessibility concerns such as those of wheelchair users, cutesy “stay home uwu” projects from well-to-do art celebrities (who are certainly not suffering too greatly from the economic ramifications of this pandemic), I, like the reader featured in the Dezeen Tweet at the beginning of this post, have simply had enough of this bullshit. 

What’s most astounding to me about all of this (but especially about #brand crap like the burger king crowns) is that it is taken completely seriously by design establishments that, despite being under the purview of PR firms, should frankly know better. I’m sure that Bjarke Ingels and Burger King aren’t nearly as affected by the pandemic as those who have lost money, jobs, stability, homes, and even their lives at the hands of COVID-19 and the criminally inept national and international response to it. On the other hand, I’m sure that architects and designers are hard up for cash at a time when nobody is building and buying anything, and, as a result, many see resulting to PR-chitecture as one of the only solutions to financial problems. 

However, I’m also extremely sure that there are interventions that can be made at the social, political, and organizational level, such as campaigning for paid sick leave, organizing against layoffs and for decent severance or an expansion of public assistance, or generally fighting the rapidly accelerating encroachment of work into all aspects of everyday life – that would bring much more good and, dare I say, progress into the world than a cardboard desk captioned with the hashtag #StaytheF***Home. 

Hence, I’ve spent most of my Saturday penning this article on my blog, McMansion Hell. I’ve chosen to run this here because I myself have lost work as a freelance writer, and the gutting of publications down to a handful of editors means that, were I to publish this story on another platform, it would have resulted in at least a few more weeks worth of inflatable, wearable, plexiglass-laden Coronagrifting, something my sanity simply can no longer withstand. 

So please, Dezeen, designboom, others – I love that you keep daily tabs on what architects and designers are up to, a resource myself and other critics and design writers find invaluable – however, I am begging, begging you to start having some discretion with regards to the proposals submitted to you as “news” or “solutions” by brands and firms, and the cynical, ulterior motives behind them. If you’re looking for a guide on how to screen such content, please scroll up to the beginning of this page. 

----

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to my Patreon, as I didn’t get paid to write it.  

[rozzwil]

ROZZ SHOW ME SHOW ME SHOW ME. Artist asks: #1, #14, #15!

1. Show me your most recent wip

I already showed some but I'm gonna do a few more because I might never post them haha

This one's from a casual class swap AU me and @diirthara-ma came up with! If I didn't get the vibe across this is Cassandra as a Necromancer and mortalitasi. I wanted to explore what might happen if she had been a mage and had embraced the nobility lifestyle 👀

This one's just from a body lineup reference sheet I was messing with from a while back! It's a little outdated but here's Ivan Amell, Alexander Adaar, and Isha Lavellan

14. How has your art changed over the years?

I'm house sitting and away from my computer but that means I DO have access to really old pre-digital art 👀

PreK/Kindergarten: Most of my early art was exclusively Pokemon related. Here's a poster advertising a "Pokemon Klub" and a reference sheet I made for myself of Unkown

Elementary School: Still very into Pokemon and Digimon. Here's two self portraits from around 2nd and 3rd grade lol

Middle/High School: I was still going hard on Pokemon and spent a couple years working on my own Fakemon region. Here's some of my concept art for my starters feat. my water starter which was a lifeguard/arctic wolf. Scott Pilgrim and shows like Adventure Time were also big influences at the time

I bought my first tablet when I was 15 and that really transformed my art habits. I switched almost exclusively to digital and began posting on social media. In retrospect, I would section out a couple big arcs for my art since then.

From 15-19 I was really motivated to make art a career and was excited about building a following. Within a year I gained a few thousand followers and was really excited that I was able to sell my art and commissions for money.

By early college I started to lose interest in grinding and was bouncing around several different career paths. At this time I started to try out a lot of new art styles and explore concepts I had always felt too intimidated by before. From 20-22 I didn't create much art that I was proud of or wanted to post. This is the hardest era of my art to look back on but it was also when I experienced a lot of growth. In particular, I started painting and using color in ways that I had never tried before and I started taking a lot less shortcuts when it comes to anatomy and rendering difficult poses. This was also when I began exploring original concepts and characters through RPGs like Dragon Age and D&D.

I associate age 23- the present with my art focussing almost exclusively on original concepts. I'm also very disengaged from social media outside of a small community of friends and artists I enjoy. This allows me to disentangle my motivation to create from external factors which has helped me enjoy sharing my art again. Most of what I draw is done through collaboration with @diirthara-ma and I take a lot enjoyment from other forms of creating like talking about characters, creating charts, moodboards, and playlists, as well as sculpting and miniature making (for D&D). I also enjoy the process of drawing a lot more and spend much more time just doing figure sketches or playing around with another artist's color pallete.

15. Biggest artist pet peeve?

This one's hard! I'd say that I have a bad habit of constantly desaturating my color palette for no reason throughout a piece and then having to resaturate everything again later.

I also got so chill about not posting I now have a hard time remembering to post my art. I also tend to forget I've drawn something if I don't post it so I constantly find old art in my folders I never did anything with lol

[imjustmarcy]

My Ao3 review of the year??

So, because I have nothing better to do, here: have a list of every fic (mainly bnha, oops) that I posted this year, sorted by different AUs and plot bc holy shit I made like 4 series this year-

Endeavor-centric:

The day that wasn't (x) (5k) Gonna be honest, not a big fan of Endeavor, but my pal Platypus mentioned their dream they had and well, this was born. Basically Endeavor getting hit with a Quirk that turns him into a ghost and makes so he's forced to follow his children around and hear what they really think of him. With a sprinkle of DabiHawks

Hawks-centric:

The Discovery (x) (1k) so my brain decided to write aromatic bisexual Hawks bc self project much and this is just a small piece of him finding out he's aro.

Very self indulgent DabiHawks plus Mar projecting onto Hawks again:

The bird that forgot how to fly (x) (2k) just some hurt/comfort that I wrote to vent

Dabihawks as parents:

Yes I am indeed that bitch. Now prepare yourself bc I wrote A LOT about this...

Phoenix (x) (20k) basically the introduction to the story of Ryu, the DabiHawks kid, and chapter two goes more in depth about him and his best friends. Chapter one is more DabiHawks centric, and chapter 3 is just a mister dump of extra info.

A (not really) spooky Halloween (x) (3k) Halloween special of Ryu trying to sneak out to a haunted house with his friends. Spoiler: his dads know and just decide to fuck with him.

Ryu's little time travel adventure (x) (6k) Ryu gets hit with a Quirk that sends him to the past, before his idiotic dads were even together. There will be a next part to this but at this rate it will have to be posted sometime in January so...

The new League of Villains (x) (7k) so Mar's monkey brain wanted to make a part with Ryu becoming a villain so... He's vry badass and formes the Dragon Alliance, aka the new LOV, with the help of his best friends and with the purpose of destroying the Hero Commission :D

Dabihawks has Ryu, but it's crack:

There's a lot more crack works for the Dragon Verse than there is for the 'Canon' story... Oh well

Sneaky is my middle name (or not) (x) (4k) Hawks has a big ass mouth and lets it slip he has a son and is married. Dabi is not amused.

Who's the dad? (x) (4k) follow-up to that disaster and poor attempt at a social media fic. The internet is smart and everyone already suspects that #DabiIsTheDad

Should've keep it in your pants (x) (4k) inspired by the amazing fic 'Stolen Fried Chicken'. Where Hawks discovers that his son's dad is very much not dead. Ft Natsuo and Hawks being the best bros and having one braincell between the two of them.

Dabi's Biggest Secret(s) (x) (3k) the Todorokis find a bunch of old flash drives with their older brother's videos and discover he used to date Hawks and had a kid with him before they even graduated high school :D

Hawks makes a scene (x) (2k) complementary to the previous part, with Hawks finding out Touya is not dead and proceeding to scream at his face in front of the entire League because he left Hawks and his son to belive he was dead.

Dabi the waking cryptid (x) (1k) modern college AU with no quirks?? I guess. So the league is all curious about why does Dabi never hangs out with them. Guy's just busy with his model and actor fiancé, his studies, and their son.

Again very self indulgent DabiHawks but it's Angel and demon AU.

Angel wings and demon instincts (x) (6k) Dabi is a demon and gets sent to earth to cause havoc, Hawks is an angel sent to find Dabi and keep him from causing havoc. They gay for each other. That's it.

An angel's first time (x) (1k) the first smut I write in the past 4 years or so, still demon and angel AU.

Shiggy, Hawks and Dabi being childhood friends <3

The Terror Trio (x) (2k) those three as childhood friends + their reunion, with a sprinkle or Shiggy/Natsuo and DabiHawks at the end.

The de-aged Terror Trio (or the little menaces, according to Aizawa Shota) (x) (5k) the Terror Trio get de-aged and found by Aizawa, who takes them to UA. They almost make class 1A have a heart attack.

Converting Eri to chaos, a guide by the Terror Trio (x) (5k) the de-aged Terror Trio bonds with Eri and they cause havoc at UA. A fourth and maybe last part on the works.

Yay for even more self indulgent DabiHawks:

The mysterious case of Hawks' boyfriend (x) (2k) Hawks is already dating Dabi, everyone at his agency are snoopy bitches and want to know the tea.

FINALLY, SOMETHING THAT'S NOT BNHA! My vld rewrite:

My Blood (x) (800) Lance is Altean and Allura is his cousing. Lotor is his half-brother. Klance and Lotura. The og version (the Spanish version, being published in my wattpad) is currently about halfway through the story, with 30 chapters. I'm working on translating this one and posting it on AO3, hence the low word count.

Aaaaand that's it. I just started writing in English this year, and that sort of really boosted my creativity, since I started posting stuff on AO3 just this past September, so to post this much fics in that amount of time... Damn. Will update the post if I manage to finish this I'm writing for Christmas/Ryu's birthday/Hawks' birthday.

[fireladyfae]

*Artist Spotlight!*

Today’s artist spotlight features @artzzofkae!

ArtzzofKae says…

⚜ When you share my art, I prefer you use my pen name - Kae. It’s not my real name, but it is my real life nickname. In some way it feels even more personal, but in a different way, it gives me a privacy that cannot always be given by social media. ❤ ⚜ And please give full credit by tagging me, don’t crop the watermark included in the image and please leave the link leading to the original post even if it is not clickable.

⚜Please do *NOT* share my art if you are unable to tag me.

⚜ What is your preferred medium & how long have you been working with it? My preferred medium at the moment is digital art - I mostly work with my iPad, using Procreate.

⚜ Do you create art in other mediums? I haven’t touched traditional art in ages, but when I do, I like working with acrylics, or simply markers and pencil.

⚜ How long have you been creating Zutara art? I have only created one Zutara artwork ever, because when the show doesn’t make something you want canon, the best you can do is make it canon yourself. 😏 🔥 The Zutara ship was my favorite thing about ATLA. I even named my bunny Zuko, that’s how much I am invested in those characters, hahaha.

⚜ Do you have a redbubble or donation site? I have a Redbubble shop. The link can be found in my bio on my instagram account.

⚜ Do you take requests or accept commissions? Once in the month I leave a survey in my instastories, where you can put your requests. Aside of that, I do not accept requests. I do however accept commissions. Unfortunately for the time being they are closed due to some busy time in my personal life. 💕

⚜ Do you have any other platforms you would like others to check out? Under the same username (artzzofkae) I have also accounts on Twitter, Tumblr and Artfolapp.

⚜ What is your country of birth and what is your first language? :) My country of birth is Czech Republic and my first language is Czech. ❤

> Be sure to click her link to give her a follow and check out ALL of the Awesome art there! :D

A BIG THANK YOU! To ArtzzofKae for agreeing to be featured in our Artist Spotlight! https://www.instagram.com/p/CQvBU6OF7ty/?utm_medium=tumblr

[miniatureworlds]

New York Times: The Dollhouses of Instagram

'Instagram-inspired enthusiasts are making their interior-design dreams real — only 12 times smaller.

(Image: Trisha Krauss)

By Ronda Kaysen, March 13, 2020

'The kitchen that Jessica Coffee designed checked all the trendy boxes: white Shaker cabinets, a subway-tile backsplash, wide oak-plank floors and an open-concept floor plan, with views into the living room’s shiplap walls. The photographs she posted on her Instagram page evoked enthusiastic comments from followers, who gushed about high-end details like the water filler above the stove.

The only drawback? Ms. Coffee, 40, can’t actually serve a meal in her kitchen, at least not a real one, because the room, like the rest of the house, is built to a 1:12 scale — that 36-inch chef’s stove is actually three inches long. It’s in a dollhouse that sits in the real-life master bedroom of her home in Walla Walla, Wash., which looks nothing like her amazing tiny one.

“People are always like, ‘Ooh! I would like to see your real house.’ No you wouldn’t. I live in a house that is barely 1,000 square feet with three kids and a Great Dane,” said Ms. Coffee, who sells her miniature designs and posts online tutorials at Jessica Cloe Miniatures. “My dollhouse square footage is much better than my actual square footage.”

'Ms. Coffee is among a growing community of artisans who have turned the craft of dollhouse making into an exercise in aspirational home design on an itty-bitty scale, with their tiny rooms and furnishings displayed on well-curated Instagram accounts with glossy photographs and videos set to music reminiscent of “The Fixer Upper” on HGTV. Scroll too quickly, or miss the photograph with a human-scale hand surreally poking into the scene, and a viewer might confuse the image for a real-life one, the type of image that leaves you feeling equally amazed by and envious of the enormous kitchen island with a soapstone countertop.

These dollhouse makers and collectors say we’ve entered a miniature Renaissance. Call it a Mini-Aissance. “We’re living in it now,” said Kate Esme Ünver, who curates miniatures on her Instagram page Dailymini, and is the author of the 2019 book “The Book of Mini: Inside the Big World of Tiny Things.”

Social media has turned what was once a niche hobby into a decidedly trendy and increasingly profitable business, making it easier for artisans to find each other and potential customers online. The Instagram hashtag #dollhouse has 1.65 million posts and #miniature has almost 4.3 million, a mix of posts from people making miniatures and those sharing what they’ve found. Victorian-era lace and antique armoires are being scrapped for midcentury modern chairs, fiddle-leaf fig plants and sputnik chandeliers. House Beautiful took notice and commissioned 11 interior designers to reimagine a Victorian dollhouse in their own style, auctioning the decidedly contemporary finished products at the New York Design Center on Feb. 27.

In the past six months, searches on Etsy for 1:12 scale furniture were up 39 percent and searches for dollhouse rugs and miniature items were up 20 percent from the same period a year ago. A search on the site for dollhouses yields 237,000 results. “It’s certainly a trend that’s rising,” said Dayna Isom Johnson, an Etsy trend expert. The popular items — miniature succulents, bath salts, word art — point to an interest from the grown-ups, not their children. “Maybe there are very sophisticated 10-year-olds out there who want a midcentury sofa, but I assume these are adults who want to take this on as a new hobby.”

Chris Toledo, 34, who showcases his diminutive creations on the Instagram account I Build Small Things, has watched his business soar in the past two years thanks to social media. He now sells his dollhouses, designed in a nod to the 1920s architecture of Los Angeles, where he lives, for $150,000 to $200,000 apiece.

“Before, miniatures were only publicized through miniature magazines,” he said. “Social media put it in everybody’s face.” His homes feature intricately detailed rooms, like a kitchen with a subway-tile backsplash and a schoolhouse pendant light that would look real if it weren’t for the life-size head of garlic positioned in the middle of the room.

'While some artisans specialize in furnishings and décor, Mr. Toledo focuses on the architecture, selling complete dollhouses as well as individual rooms — like a bathroom in a shadow box — for as much as $20,000. He designs the rooms by hand, milling moldings and using miniature tools, like a table saw the size of a shoe box, for carpentry work.

The advent of 3-D printers has opened the door for people without such advanced woodworking skills, too — to the disappointment of traditional dollhouse makers, who view such technology as taboo. Ms. Coffee of Walla Walla, for example, uses a 3-D printer to make smaller objects, like decorative pumpkins, which she sells for $5. She makes other items, such as throw pillows, using everyday materials and tools like glue, fabric, tweezers and quilt batting.

A year into her craft, Ms. Coffee now sells enough printable herringbone floors and cowhide rugs on her website to turn a profit, although still not enough to give up her day job as a graphic designer. She also uses the dollhouses to work out design challenges in the real-life houses that she and her husband renovate and flip. If she’s not sure about a floor color or a pattern for a rug, she can try it out on a tiny scale for a few dollars. Her actual home has the same rustic wide-plank flooring as her dollhouses.

While miniatures have long had their enthusiasts, this new generation of dollhouse makers is turning to idealized contemporary homes at a time when the real-life version is increasingly out of reach for many Americans. High real estate prices and stagnating wages make it difficult for many homeowners to consider a $100,000 kitchen with a farmhouse sink and a Wolf stove. But you could have a very little one — or three of them, and fill them with teensy espresso makers, cheese boards and bottles of Dom Pérignon. Like the idea of a barn door, but don’t actually have a place to install one? Tuck it into the dollhouse attic, and if it grows tiresome, refurnish the entire room with rattan chairs, a shag rug and a soft pink palette.

'Kwandaa Roberts, an OB-GYN in Philadelphia, says she has found a following on her Instagram account, Tiny House Calls, among millennial women who pine for a prettier house. “They don’t have any money and a lot of them can’t afford to buy houses and they’re living at home with their parents or in a tiny apartment with roommates and they can’t do design and all the things that they want to do,” she said. “But like me, they can get a lot of their creative energy out on a dollhouse.”

Dr. Roberts, 47, a single mother of two, started her hobby two years ago when she bought a dollhouse at Target. She intended to give it to her daughter, now 5, but instead found that it filled a creative longing she had to be an interior designer. She painted it, added wallpaper, and details like a brass soaking tub and a kitchen with a waterfall countertop. She made furniture by hand with supplies she bought at Michaels. “I’ve always loved interior design, had a huge passion for it, and may have gone into it as a career had I known that was a thing,” she said. But when she was growing up, “there was no HGTV. Home Depot sold lumber; it was not what it is today.”

In her tiny houses, Dr. Roberts has found an outlet, and an opportunity to reveal her projects on videos and photos she shares with her 47,000 followers. “I don’t have to redo my house,” she said. Instead, “I can have 10,000 kitchens and they will be fantastic.”...'

[chrisrainicorn]

Commissions sale! 50% OFF!!

Trying this again because I need something to do during quarantine or I will be absorbed by the void skgjss And yup you read right, it’s all half the price!

More info under the cut! If you’re not interested, a simple reblog is appreciated! :D

I have two art styles you can choose from, one being more cartoony and less detailed (simpler lines, simpler shading).

For more examples, you can check my art tag or my DA (same username, link in my bio - if you are considering, I strongly encourage looking through my DA gallery for newer pieces, I post extra stuff there that aren’t here on tumblr).

I can draw animals now - including a pet if provided pictures and descriptions! Prices for that are negotiable and depend on the type of animal.

If you’re interested, contact me at christinesspala@gmail.com. Specifying the following:

Your Tumblr URL

Commission attributes (Art Style, Bust/Half/Full Body, Line/Flat/FullColor)

Extra additions if any (there is no limit for additions for now, but I won’t take anything that I know it’s going to be too much for me)

Character References (especially if OC or if you want a specific accessory/clothing/setting)

Pose of Preference

Expression of Preference

Full Description of what you have in mind! Don’t spare any details and, please, try to be as clear as possible - english is not my first language.

Obs.: Lately, I’ve been only using a brush with a pencil-like texture for my art. Some of the examples up there are oldish drawings from before I found out that it was more compatible with my style, where I used a more standard brush. The texturized brush is my main one now, but if you prefer the older one, you can just specify that and I’ll use it, since it doesn’t really affect the drawing process.

Payment through Paypal only. If your character design is too complex, the price can go up a bit. But I’ll make sure to send to you the final price before emailing the Paypal invoice.

The full payment has to be upfront. Paypal charges me a fee for every international transaction, so if I split, that amount would be discounted twice.

You can suggest changes during the sketching phase. After I start the lines, you will still get updates on the progress, but any extra requests for modifications will be charged.

My drawing process usually doesn’t take longer than a week, it can happen though, especially if the drawing is more complex. But if life gets in the way and causes any big delays, you will be notified.

I don’t know if many people will be interested, so there’s no set amount of available slots for now. I’ll probably work in one drawing at the time – first-come, first-served.

After complete, I retain the right to post the artwork wherever I need it. You can repost it on your own social media, all I ask then is to be credited! The artwork is for your personal use only - no reselling.

If you have any questions, feel free to send me an ask or email! And thank you for reading! :D

[trickstermiraculous]

Siblings That Are Both Heroes But Only One Knows That Fact

Summary: Jason is nervous but gets to talk with Marinette and Adrien?

Chapter Two: Nervous And Texting Your Sister's Boyfriend

Author’s Note: Not used to writing the bat brothers dialogue so sorry if this is bad. I know about the bat brothers from young justice, some of the comics, Tumblr, fanfiction and my own research.

Jason was nervous to say the lease, he finally gets to see his baby sister again in person since he was Robin. He had been back for three years at this point and he didn’t visit his sister, Jason was just glad that she and her adoptive family agree to meet them although, he was upset that he couldn’t see her at the Gala due to her being busy.

“Todd, can you please shut up” growled Damien who was sat across from him on the plane, reading one of the books from the mansion’s library,

“I didn’t say anything brat” retorted Jason glaring at him,

“You were thinking too loud” replied Damien,

“He’s just nervous Little D,” Dick said cutting off Jason,

“I am not” snapped Jason which just made Dick raise his eyebrow.

“Well maybe if he didn’t leave his sister in the dark so long, he wouldn’t be” snapped Damien,

“You know full well, the reasons I had to do that, you brat” growled Jason which just made Damien roll his eyes and go back to reading his book.

“If you so nervous, why don’t you just text her before you meet her tomorrow” stated Dick throwing a piece of paper at Jason which he caught and saw that there was a phone number on it,

“This is her phone number?” Jason questioned slowly,

“yep her parents gave it to Bruce so that you could contact her” answered Dick,

“And you tell me now?” snapped Jason,

“Well when Bruce told me to give it to you I was busy and I just remember that I had it” defend Dick putting his hand up in from of him as a way to say ‘don’t attack me’, “now text her before your nerves get the better of you”.

Sighing Jason pulled out his phone and added the number to his contacts with the name Pixie Pop which is something he used to call her when they were both still on the streets.

                                            -------- Chat Open --------

Jason: Hey Marinette, it’s Jason Todd

Pixie Pop: Jason as her big brother who is actually alive even though he has been missing for years

Jason: yes

Jason: who are you? because I know this is her phone number

Pixie Pop: Her boyfriend Adrien

Pixie Pop: she asked me to keep her phone safe while the teacher pulled her in for a ‘chat’

Jason: a chat

Jason: she in trouble

Pixie Pop: more like she got the blame for not being the perfect example that our class has to follow

Pixie Pop: even though she not at fault for the crap behaviour that our classmates have

Pixie Pop: shit I’m rambling

Pixie Pop: I told Mari that I caught it off her

Jason: right...

Jason: so let me get this straight, she’s in trouble for a teacher not doing her job

Pixie Pop: got it in one

Jason: how the fuck does that work

Pixie Pop: We’ve been questioning that for months butbdjsahdjdfs

Jason: you ok kid

Pixie Pop: Adrien is fine

Pixie Pop: Holy shit Jason

Pixie Pop: wait no this could be a prank by Max

Jason: what kind of sick person would pretend to be someone brother who you thought was dead as a prank

Jason: what kind of people are you hanging around with Pixie Pop

Pixie Pop: well I know for a fact I never told people about that nickname and mum did just confirm that you were given my number

Pixie Pop: so hi Jason

Pixie Pop: as for what kind of person would do that, well I would really put it past her

Jason: who is her

Pixie Pop: no one important

Pixie Pop: anyway

Pixie Pop: It’s nice to finally talk to you

Jason: don’t go changing the subject

Pixie Pop: I’m not talking to you about school drama especially when I’m at school

Jason: fine but we are talking about this later

Pixie Pop: sure thing mom

Jason: cool it with the sarcasm

Jason: also question

Jason: what’s got you so busy that you can’t come to the Gala

Pixie Pop: commissions

Pixie Pop: also I got asked last minute

Jason: Commissions?

Pixie Pop: I’m a fashion designer

Pixie Pop: well technically I’m just starting out but uncle jagged did ask me for a commission over proper designers

Jason: Uncle Jagged?

Pixie Pop: Jagged Stone

Pixie Pop: he’s been close family friend since I made him the Eiffel tower glasses

Jason: Holy shit Pixie Pop

Jason: Your designing for Jagged Stone

Pixie Pop: A fan?

Jason: yes but I blame Dick for it

Pixie Pop: Your brother, Richard Grayson

Jason: yeah how you know that

Pixie Pop: Research

Pixie Pop: more like a background check

Pixie Pop: shut it, Adrien

Jason: Background check

Pixie Pop: I was curious about who adopted you

Pixie Pop: ok

Pixie Pop: like you haven’t done the same

Jason: fair

Jason: also Adrien,

Jason: Your boyfriend

Jason: want to explain that

Pixie Pop: first off I’m seventeen

Pixie Pop: second off it’s more of a secret relationship until he’s eighteen

Jason: why a secret relationship?

Pixie Pop: Press

Pixie Pop: and his father would make us break up if he knew

Jason: He has a shitty father, got it

Jason: also press?

Pixie Pop: Adrien Agreste, teen model for the Agreste brand

Jason: A model

Jason: nice catch there Pixie Pop

Pixie Pop: thanks

Pixie Pop: shit gotta go

                                         --------Chat Ended--------

Jason turned off his phone with a smile as his nerves seemed to have disappeared for now although he was concerned about what type of school she went to. “I’m guessing texting her went well,” asked Dick smirking,

“Yes” muttered Jason as he grabbed his laptop from his bag,

“Whatcha doing then?” replied Dick,

“Research” answered Jason as he searched up Adrien on his computer, finding out that he goes to Collège Françoise Dupont which most likely meant that was where Marinette went.

“For what?” asked Dick,

“She mentioned something concerning about her teacher, well she didn’t her boyfriend did” replied Jason,

“So she has a boyfriend” question Dick,

“Adrien Agreste” answered Jason,

“The model?” asked Dick

“Yeah, how do you know?” replied Jason raising an eyebrow,

“A few of the younger heroes were drooling over a magazine with his photo and when I asked, I got basically his whole background” answered Dick,

“Right” replied Jason,

“Anyway have fun with that research” stated Dick turning back to his own computer where he was working on a case.

Jason just hummed in response as he eventually found Marinette’s social media to which he spent the rest of the plane ride looking through in order to get an idea on how much his little sister had changed.

Author’s Notes: Glad people enjoyed the first chapter, I just hope you enjoy this one.

AO3

Wattpad

[artandhuddle]

Artist Interview with Daphne Hutcheson

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Daphne Hutcheson, an artist I’ve admired for quite some time. Her work and knowledge in the arts has helped me, along with many other artists in the online community.

Daphne Hutcheson, also known as @paperwick on social media, has been creating artwork from a very young age, with works in both traditional and digital media. Her work covers a broad range of fandoms, original content, and client based works along with some very useful and resourceful tutorials. 

K: I wanted to first ask about your experience attending SCAD (Savannah College of Art & Design)?

D: My experience at SCAD was tepid at best. The teachers were good, but I mean very specifically the professors who were teaching in my major, which was sequential art. SCAD is really not a great institute for anyone who isn't rich enough for their parents' to cover the cost. That's my biggest issue with it, they will cripple you with debt, so if anyone is lower-income, I would highly suggest learning via some of great online courses or using a state college's art program to sort of direct you if you need direction and deadlines. I know I need them. SCAD's loans are no joke. The college itself was very good my first year, they do a lot to make sure incoming students feel heard and welcomed, and then after that they really don't try for you. As soon as you're a sophomore, they could care less about how you feel to be there. Their class attendance requirements are grueling and there's no room for accidents--you miss four class sessions and you fail the course. It's wild, and even if you're in the hospital, those absences will not be forgiven. If you're late, it counts as an absence.I don't recommend it. At all. All the learning I garnered there is online accessible these days, one just has to hunker down, find it, and put it to practice. My professors were great, but no education is worth that price tag. Depending on your major there, you will be treated differently by the school. For example, their fashion and fibers majors are doted on, whereas a major like animation is ground hard into the dirt. There were unrealisitc deadlines to meet for class projects and kids would be in the school buildings overnight trying to meet them. Some fell asleep in their chairs and Paula Wallace (the owner) saw that one day and had them replace the chairs with far less comfortable chairs. Some kids had heart attacks from staying up to meet deadlines. Such a bad work culture of "all-nighters". In part the students' fault, but none of the faculty really stopped it or discouraged it, save one teacher in a different major, and that being said, that teacher still gave ridiculous deadlines so we'd "be prepared for the industry". That's not at all what the industry is like (discluding the game industry right now). It is truly a hard place to thrive and everyone I've known who has graduated had months to years of burnout after finishing, including myself. I'd hazard real caution when choosing to go to a private art college, art institutes included.No education is worth that amount of debt.

K: Wow, that’s unfortunate to hear. I wonder if students are having similar experiences at colleges such as CAD or RISD?

D: I have heard very similar things about places like RISD and CAD where it’s all about the money, but I can’t point you towards any of the specifics. I really just want people to go into it with a clear head and know it’s going to be hard exiting. They really don’t prepare you for business.

K: What would you have done differently? Would you have signed up for online courses?

D: If I was to do it over, I would have liked to dive straight into developing personal projects, just making the work. Watching and reading free youtube videos and blog posts by artists. That would not have flown with my parents, they’re very by the book “go to college or get a job” type people. With than in mind, I would’ve gone to the local college I was within biking distance of as a sort of clean, and done fairly half assed studies by full assed my artwork.

K: That sounds like what a lot of artists, particularly those interested in digital art are doing. But, have you ever considered going back to school, or enrolling in a program or an atelier that you think would be beneficial to your art career?

D: Not genuinely. If I had time, I wouldn't mind enrolling in something that would teach me puppet animation, but between freelance and my day job, it's hard to find time to produce personal work and then also learn. I am pro-learning, always learning because that keeps your work fresh, keeps your mind sharp and ready to switch up on a dime. But course work is something I'm not super fond of, to be honest.

K: I understand. So, you've graduated and are currently doing freelance work along with your other day job. In your freelance work, what kind of work are you taking from clients?

D: Mostly I do storyboard animatics for a few advertising agencies, but I do some card art for games here and there, like Companion's Tale. I just signed on to do some tarot card artwork for a company called Legacy: Fables. I'll take anything that sounds interesting and that I have time for. It's all digital; traditional art is way more personal for me so I almost exclusively make traditional artwork as gifts for friends.

K: Are there any particular fandoms or genres that you tend to work more in?

D: As far as fandom work and commissions, it's Dragon Age all the way BABY! It's a good community and I owe a lot to them. I'm planning on reopening my tarot commissions here soon once I finish up a few of my freelance projects. I am an old hat with fantasy stuff and most comfortable there, but I really want to start working on robots and mechanics and cities. All that sci-fi goodness.

K: Wow, that's great to hear you've got very steady work, and they’re with industries and agencies! I hope you'll get to share that work once it's gone down the production pipeline. Have you ever considered applying for work with a company like EA/Bioware?

D: Yeah! I've lucked out a lot, it feels like all of this sort of dumped itself in my lap. My biggest resistance to applying to Bioware or any gaming industry position right is rooted in how they treat their workers. Bioware, specifically back when Anthem was released, had a nasty report come out on how management had run their workers to the point of many having mental breakdowns, and several just leaving and never coming back. They refer to those who have breakdowns while working during their months and months of crunch as "stress casualties", and I'm honestly quite disgusted by what I hear. I think once the gaming industry unionizes I'll consider applying, but the things I hear, not just about Bioware and EA... It's horrifying. Riot, Blizzard, Activision, Treyarch, Rockstar... the list could go on. Not to like tank the conversation into a dark place, I just have such strong feelings about it.

K: That's ok! It's good to hear different perspectives, especially when talking about the industry. Alright, on to the next question. Looking at your work, from sequential narrative to tarot artwork, I’m really impressed by your storytelling. When you’re creating stories and characters, do you pull a lot from your own experiences and emotions, or more from other sources such as music, film, or literature?

D: Ahh that's a hard one. I think I pull far more from outside of me than inside of me.The way things are shaped comes from my own experience, but I think a lot of my content comes from outside influences, like movies, books, music, and art.Howls Moving Castle, the book not the film, had a huge affect on me and how light I want the stories I tell to be, but I think I have a long way to go when putting stories together.I am super empathetic so it's easy to take outside influences and really feel them, but also it's hard to tell where I start and those influences ends.

K: Very well said, and the comment about the novel, I can really feel that in your personal work, especially your recent animated landscape piece.

D: Thanks!

K: The first time I came across your work was one of your Dragon Age tarot works, but also the tutorial on how you created them. It was incredibly helpful to me and I know to lots more artists. Your tutorials and words of advice have proven very successful, but have you ever received any advice or tutorials that really switched gears or level upped your techniques?

D: The answer is yes, absolutely. Let me see, I don't seek out tutorials anymore, but there was something I saw recently that was good. Sinix's head from any angle is a great approach to drawing faces at crazy angles. Also, check out Bunabi on Tumblr. Bunabi is so fast and her work is beautiful, and has great tutorials also, just incredible. 

I unfortunately can’t link to any specifics, but tutorials like this one do me a lot of good.  

People can just screenshot process stuff that reminds me that there are a million ways to approach art, like sketch up, grids, freehanding. I think I benefit from understanding that there are a million approaches more than following the tutorials super hard.

K: Great,thank you! I wanted to ask a few more questions, one about your Patreon. It seems like the next big wave for digital artists. How has it been creating one and keeping on top of the awards, and is there anything you would want to do differently with yours?

D: So Patreon is kind of a basket you can fill with prizes, maybe some of the prizes for money (probably prizes for money), and that works for a lot of people. I have a more of a "here's content I don't put elsewhere if you'd like it" approach to it cause I'm inconsistent with patron pay-outs. Patreon for artists with chronic mental illness is a struggle. Hands down. I started one hoping it would iron out my discipline issues a year or two back, and it didn't. It made me feel hella guilty cause I could not keep up with what I said I'd keep up with, and then I felt worse. It was disastrous. I refunded most of the pledges I got during the three months I had it open. Then I closed it for a year and brought it back online recently. Now all my content is free, it's still inconsistent, but if people want to support me I welcome it. I think Patreon is a good platform, but I will never be able to use it is intended. I respect the people who can keep up with it all, that kind of discipline takes a crazy amount of strength of character, but I don't motivate with money very well. In the end, I motivate through helping others as best I can, so it'll always be free content. I have very few plans for it, other than I want to put together a brush pack and share it there with brushes I made. I just need a moment to sit down and make that happen. I've got a tutorial for using photos to make quick painted backgrounds too, and I just have to organize that sucker.

K: Thank you for being so open about it. I think what you're doing is so insightful and helpful in what you're offering to your followers, especially those who may also be struggling with anxiety and depression.

K: Can you share what your process is like from a sketch to a finished piece? Do you thumbnail a lot before, use references to build from, and so on?

D: I like to do throw away thumbnails on notepaper.

And then I take those thumbnails and do a more thought out version digitally.

K: Wow, these are both beautiful. If you don't share these with patrons already, I would! I also like that you've given each one their own color, a good way to organize!

D: Thank you! I'll make sure to share these, I forget about them genuinely. I'll diverge in two directions from here depending on need. If what I'm working on is simple, I hop straight into color. If it's going to be complicated, ie crazy armor, specific architecture, I will do a line pass first and then launch into color. Either way, this is where most of my references come into play. Once that is solid I add detail work.

K: Reference can be so important in art; it really can bring work to a new level if used properly!

D: Yeah reference is king. I use it constantly, even when doing the most stylized thing, cause there's always stuff you forget. The waves I did for my last card, I had reference of barrel waves up constantly, and it helps a ton.

K: My last question is where do you see yourself in five years? I know this can be a challenging question, but if you had any goals or plans you’d like to see come into fruition, what would they be?

D: Five years? These questions are always a struggle for me. I try not to look past a week at a time because it's all so BIG. And my life has undergone so many huge changes in such a short period of time SO MANY times that it's hard to make long term plans. Especially when dealing with mental illness. So I try to think less about where I'll be in any amount of time, and more about what I want to progress towards achieving, it's a little easier and sets up less expectation. So this is not necessarily a five year plan, and more an eventual future plan. I want to have enough tutorial work to put together an art resources book/pdf online. I want to develop my freelance work further and create my own studio, ideally for illustrative style work, smaller animations, and maybe some classes for people interested in color and storytelling. I want to put together a small guide of sorts also for artists and people who need healing, since there's so many of us. That one is harder because it's an amorphous subject, but I think there's a lot of room for commentary there and a lot of people wanting to hear it, and I think it'll have to come from all those hurting. It's just a matter of how we'll organize that.I am a huge sap. That's my way. So in 5 years I'm hoping I'll be a better and more helpful sap.

K: Well, I hope you're able to make a lot of this happen, we need more empathy and help in the world. Thank you again Daphne for your time, this was really informative and an honest interview which I know others will appreciate.

D: Thank you, Kallie!

You can find more of Daphne’s beautiful works (and tutorials) here:

Patreon

Twitter

Tumblr

[two4joy]

I’m watching a tiny bit of drama play out where Big Blog on Tumblr published a book and is now having to explain to their followers why they cannot tag them in fanfic about their work or posts where they offer commissions for fanfic on their work and it is really blowing my mind a little. Like there is so much going on here that I’m trying to weigh and unpick. Like: a). Not to be all shaking a stick and telling kids to get off my lawn but there really is a generation gap in fandom. When I started in HP fandom in the aughties, there was still a strong sense that if you wrote fanfic you left the author alone, you put disclaimers at the top of your work; that what you were doing COULD NOT involve the creator because it wasn’t quite kosher and you might get in legal trouble. With that, there was a kind of ‘fuck you, stay away from my fic’ attitude towards creators. Now post JK Rowling and Stephanie Meyer’s embrace of their fandoms and making bank and the mass embrace of social media in social, political, and economic life, big media companies and creators have realized that engaging with fans is profitable and a whole generation of zoomers have grown up with the idea that engaging with content creators in this way is safe and fun.  b). There is now also a whole generation of authors/creators who came up through fandom or through Tumblr and who rely on their parasocial relationships to their fans/following to survive/make money and also are not meaningfully separate from their following in some ways as their blog is also a social space where they connect with friends. c). This creates a genuinely strange situation where many of their young fans do not understand how to have appropriate boundaries with them as a creator/author. This is bad for the author/creator because it puts them in a potentially tenuous situation legally. d). HOWEVER this does not feel like their young fans fault as the whole media environment where creators are accessible to their fans is actually a way that companies and creators market their stuff now. Plenty of these young fans bought these creators work because they feel they have a relationship with the creator. Anyway, I have no conclusions here and I don’t think anyone is acting maliciously or doing anything wrong necessarily but I do feel uncomfortable with the whole thing.

[lithefidercreatures]

Fall Update!

I had a really busy spring-summer and just wasn’t motivated to post much on social media, I was focusing more on just doing things. I just didn’t have the spoons leftover to post pics / stories for everything.  I was so physically/mentally tired I couldn’t take on more commissions , I was just finishing the ones I had lined up in the late winter. I didn’t even have time to fill my store this summer besides making fairy kei jewelry stock (I was selling lot of my grab bags and some other accessories!  I love pastel rainbows pastels so much...!!) 

Reason for lack of spoons was, I was planning my wedding!  Me and bae had our offical commitment ceremony Sept 7 with many loved ones - some more info on that on this post here on my personal blog <3

Now that the big day is past, I feel like I have a lot more mental energy!  I am working on some fall plush atm, including 4 CANDYCORN BATS for a mid-October store drop (and 4 more that were for premium commission pre-pay slots).  Though I am also prepping for selling at DERPYCON October 26 weekend, so it won’t be a ton of plush dropping pre-halloween but I’ll do my best!  My bae helps me prepare general con stock (she is great at making bags and wallets and other quality awesome sewn things now). I then will work on premades to sell for holiday season, been too long since I made some new owls, cowls, chibi quads, etc....and will pick up new commissions again in early January.  Sorry this year was lacking on online selling plush updates. With the wedding, teaching more at work, doing some art commissions, and trips, it just didn’t happen.  I have lots of new design ideas, and want to write more plush patterns for sale too.  :D Thanks so much everyone for your support!  And as always don’t worry I ALWAYS make a post leading up to any store plush drops, and post about it when they are up.  If you follow my Etsy store, tumblr, or twitter you definitely will get notified!   

[nothingman]

>

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

On Wednesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a massive antitrust lawsuit against Facebook, claiming the social media giant has harmed competition by buying up smaller companies like Instagram and WhatsApp to squash the threat they posed to its business. Forty-seven other state and regional attorneys general are joining the suit.

The lawsuit centers on Facebook’s history of acquisitions starting, particularly its $1 billion purchase of Instagram in 2011. In addition to its acquisition strategy, the attorneys general allege that Facebook used the power and reach of its platform to stifle user growth for competing services.

“Facebook has broken the law. It must be broken up.”

“For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition,” James said in a press conference today. “Facebook used vast amounts of money to acquire potential rivals before they could threaten the company’s dominance.”

The Federal Trade Commission is expected to bring a lawsuit against Facebook on similar grounds later today. The FTC case goes even further than the state case, explicitly calling on the court to unwind the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, spinning off both into independent companies.

“Our aim is to roll back Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct and restore competition so that innovation and free competition can thrive,” said Ian Conner, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, in a statement.

The FTC case also echoes the state AGs’ claims about anticompetitive use of platform power, particularly Facebook’s practice of “cutting off API access to blunt perceived competitive threats.” The FTC case cites Facebook’s decision to block Vine’s friend-finding feature after the Twitter acquisition as a particularly flagrant instance of this behavior.

In a newsroom statement, Facebook said both acquisitions had been cleared by regulatory agencies, and that overturning them after the fact would set a dangerous precedent. “Years after the FTC cleared our acquisitions, the government now wants a do-over with no regard for the impact that precedent would have on the broader business community or the people who choose our products every day,” the company said.

In emails revealed by the House of Representatives’ antitrust subcommittee hearing this summer, Zuckerberg characterized his intent to buy Instagram in emails to his David Ebersman, who was then Facebook’s chief financial officer, as a way to neutralize a competitor while at the same time improving Facebook — by incorporating the features its competitor invented before any other upstart has enough time to catch up and pose a similar threat.

“It appears Facebook simply bought these firms to expand its dominance”

“One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale,” Zuckerberg explained.

Within the hour, Zuckerberg sent a follow-up reply, writing, “I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,” he wrote. Antitrust lawyers saw that as an admission of guilt from Zuckerberg, who appeared to realize that what he wrote in those emails regarding his acquisition strategy constituted anticompetitive behavior.

Another pillar of the states’ antitrust lawsuit is whether Facebook acquiring a company made the product worse off from a consumer benefit standpoint — in particular, with regard to privacy. Facebook has long claimed that its resources and scale are responsible for turning apps like Instagram and WhatsApp into gigantic platforms with billions of users. But investigators targeting the deals for anticompetitive behavior are examining how, for instance, Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp and its decision to later utilize WhatsApp user data may have harmed consumers and stifled competition from rivals with better privacy practices.

Notably, the creators of both Instagram and WhatsApp have left Facebook — some, like WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, vocally disagreeing with the direction Facebook took his product and what the company has done to privacy in general. WhatsApp’s other co-founder, Jan Koum, left shortly after Acton, having reportedly clashed with Facebook leadership over its data-sharing initiative. Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger left the company over years of built-up tensions between the photo-sharing app and its relationship to Facebook’s business.

The actions are already drawing applause from antitrust advocates in Congress. Representative David Cicilline (D-RI), who led the House Antitrust hearing in July, cheered on the lawsuits in a statement to the press. “Facebook is a monopoly,” said Rep. Cicilline. “Facebook has broken the law. It must be broken up. I applaud the FTC and state attorneys general who are leading this effort today.”

Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) echoed the comments, taking particular aim at the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions. “Rather than competing with Instagram and WhatsApp, it appears Facebook simply bought these firms to expand its dominance,” said Rep. Nadler. “This should never have happened in the first place, and accountability is long overdue.”

The lawsuit marks the second major regulatory effort from the US government to rein in Big Tech, following the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Google in October for alleged illegal monopolization of the search and online ad markets.

Developing...

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CORONAVIRUS

16 MINS AGO

Will Trump and His Enablers Ever Face Accountability for the Coronavirus Massacre?

The Iraq War is not a good precedent.



DAVID CORN

Washington, DC, Bureau Chief

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Mother Jones illustration; Oliver Contreras/CNP/Zuma; Getty

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They misrepresented the threat. They disregarded experts. They did not prepare adequately. And thousands of Americans died.

And they got away with it.

The implementers, cheerleaders, and enablers of the catastrophic Iraq War were never punished for their actions. It’s not too early to wonder if Donald Trump and those who joined him in discounting and downplaying the coronavirus threat or who were part of his lethal mismanagement of the crisis or who echoed his false statements and absurd claims of winning will ever pay a price for conduct that has led to a current death toll of 12,000, which could end up a magnitude of order greater.



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The Iraq War and occupation, a strategic blunder of historic proportions that was mismanaged from the start, caused the deaths of almost 5,000 US service members and about 200,000 Iraqi civilians. And it was all for naught. There was no WMD threat to neutralize. The invasion did not remake the region and spread democracy. It wreaked chaos and violent instability that continue to plague Iraq and the world.

Yet the architects and engineers of this epic disaster never faced a reckoning. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were reelected, and after their second term was done, they were rewarded with lucrative book contracts, as was former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Paul Wolfowitz, the assistant secretary of defense, became the president of the World Bank. Bush went on to become a pal of Michelle Obama. Ari Fleischer, Bush’s press secretary, was hired as a media consultant for the NFL. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice returned to academia and public speaking and served on the college football playoff selection committee. Columnists who championed the war—Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, the editorial writers of the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal—kept their prestigious and well-paying jobs. The dogs of war who howled on Fox News and within the conservative media were not punished. Sean Hannity, a month before the 2003 invasion, declared, “We’re going to go in and we’re going to liberate this country in a few weeks and it’s going to be over very quickly…We’re going to find all of the weapons of mass destruction.” Today, Hannity is the biggest, highest-paid loudmouth at Fox. Democratic legislators who voted in 2002 to provide Bush the leeway to launch the war were not banished. Two won their party’s presidential nomination (John Kerry and Hillary Clinton), and a third (Joe Biden) is on his way to do the same.

There has never been true accountability for this massive screwup that cost thousands of Americans their lives.

Will that happen again?

It is undeniable (for any reality-based observer) that Trump botched the response to the coronavirus pandemic. A recent Washington Post article depicted this tragedy of incompetence in painful detail. And Twitter is loaded with videos showing Trump repeatedly uttering false statements, discounting the coronavirus threat, and claiming the virus was contained. For weeks, he conveyed the message that there was nothing to worry about. He was late to accept the need for social distancing and did not encourage governors to implement necessary shutdowns. He claimed a national testing system was about to start. It never happened, and his administration has failed to develop wide-scale testing. He did not move quickly to prepare health care workers with needed personal protective equipment and ventilators. He essentially told governors they were on their own.

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The most recent of all the revelations showcasing Trump’s ineptitude was especially stark. In late January, White House aide Peter Navarro sent Trump a memo noting, “There is an increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls.” The warning never registered with Trump.

There has been an endless series of profound errors committed by Trump and his administration prior to and during this horrific crisis. Then–national security adviser John Bolton shut down the White House’s global health security office in 2018; the Trump team ignored a pandemic playbook left for it by the Obama administration. And Trump, the malignant narcissist, has, to no one’s surprise, explicitly rejected all responsibility for the glaring missteps and deadly miscalculations. Instead, he has boasted about the ratings for his daily press briefings.

Trump and adoring sidekick Mike Pence will face a moment of judgment in November, when voters will render a verdict. But what of all the others who helped make this moment of mass-death possible? The Dear Leader crowd that supports Trump no matter what has echoed, protected, defended, and bolstered him as he has guided the nation into a nightmare of economic calamity and rampant death. You know who they are. (If not, watch this.) White House advisers Kellyanne Conway and Larry Kudlow—who each will likely look for remunerative gigs after their time with Trump—both claimed the coronavirus was “contained.” Trump’s newly acquired press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, proclaimed in February, “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here..and isn’t it refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama.” Rush Limbaugh told his millions of Dittohead listeners that the coronavirus was no worse than the “common cold.” (Should he give back the Medal of Freedom Trump awarded him in February?) Numerous Fox-heads, including Hannity and Laura Ingraham, misled the public, reinforcing Trump’s insistence that the threat was a hoax and discounting the seriousness of this virus. Only Trish Regan was booted by Fox after she derided what she called the “coronavirus impeachment scam.” The others have remained in place.

Then there is the Republican Party. None of its leaders have dared to challenge Trump, as he misrepresented the threat and lied about his administration’s response. Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) encouraged his constituents to ignore calls for social distancing and to go to restaurants. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) mocked concerns about the virus by wearing a gas mask on the House floor. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) never publicly questioned Trump’s multiple blunders, and they continued to lead their party in a cultlike manner of total obeisance to Trump. Many others share the blame. Conservative and right-wing evangelical leaders, including Jerry Falwell Jr. of Liberty University and Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union, reinforced the no-big-deal theme that was pushed by Trump’s White House and have considered Trump faultless.



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So with thousands of Americans dying in part because of Trump’s feckless and reckless response, who will be held responsible? Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who prosecuted the impeachment case against Trump, has proposed creating a coronavirus commission like the 9/11 commission that investigated all the mistakes and misconceptions that preceded that horrible attack. The 9/11 commission produced a detailed and elegantly written report that offered a stunning indictment of the Bush-Cheney administration and the US intelligence community. (Still, Bush and Cheney were reelected.) But one can expect Trump, the Republicans, and their amen choir to rabidly oppose Schiff’s idea (as Bush opposed establishing the 9/11 commission).

American society does not do accountability well. The instigators of the Iraq War did not suffer. Nor did the bankers who crashed the US economy in 2008. We do have elections, and Trump, Pence, and their Republican handmaids will be on the ballot in seven months. But what of the Fox barkers, the conservative movement that has become no more than a promotion vehicle for Trumpjackery, and the entire right-wing noise machine? With their obsessive devotion to Trump, they all have helped pave the way to a national massacre. Will they be able to wash the blood off their hands? Can a large and deplorable slice of the national political media apparatus be judged guilty of murderous culpability and locked up (metaphorically)?

“Nations should have memories,” Frederick Douglass once said. But Gore Vidal frequently referred to the “United States of Amnesia.” And the past is not a good prelude for accountability. Too often the culprits who contributed to death and destruction end up skating along, even experiencing personal benefit. At this moment, the priority for the nation is to rise above Trump’s incompetence and contend with a killer virus that is robbing us of our friends, neighbors, and loved ones and causing severe economic and societal dislocation. But there ought to come a time for a tallying: who did what when, during a life-and-death national crisis. And it is not too early to be collecting receipts. None of this should be forgotten.

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[queenofbohemia-art]

Alexa, play “The Bitch Is Back” by Elton John

Long time, no see, huh? How long has it been? Months? Maybe even years at this point? Who knows. Anyway. How are you? It’s been a while since I’ve last posted on this blog or even checked any kind of notifications, messages or what not... But, you know, life happened. Adulthood happened. Capitalism is still happening and for all of those reasons I kinda left my passion for painting behind. All that has mattered in the last couple of years was work, dealing with my emotional inner fuckery that I’ve been struggling with since forever and that horrible dread of hustling just to stay relevant in some matter for longer than 2 days.

2018 for me was the year of the ultimate revelations. I finally understood what kind of life I want to live. I learned how to care less about irrelevant things, how to accept myself, how to deal with my train of thoughts, feelings, I’ve learned what things make me really happy and which trigger my anxiety and depressive episodes. That’s some basic life shit, you might say, but see, the thing is that for most of my life even simple tasks seemed very big for me. They still do in some aspects but I feel like I’m controlling them more now than I did in the past.

I’m more tranquil now. I don’t stress over my social media feeds anymore. I don’t stress about forcing myself into doing something that I’m not 100% feeling, either. That state of acceptance was very hard to achieve but I did it! Yay! :D

What did come with all of these inner changes and what does this have to do with art, blog, eventual Instagram revival?  Well, everything. First of all I felt like deleting most of the art I made in the past few years. I guess it’s a common thing within us, artists, but I really needed to cut ties. I’ve left some bits and pieces on this very blog but my old IG profile is now gone, so is my old Twitter account. I needed a fresh start, you know? And the beginning of the new year seemed the best timing to do so. That being said... here we go with some conclusions and future plans:

- I’ll keep this blog only for hobby/occasional commissions purposes. I want it to be a nice place where I can inconsistently share my art, doodles, even more updated tips about painting, graphic design, info about art and techniques, etc.

- I’ll change my url soon. Give me a couple of days, so everybody knows about it, lol!

- My new Instagram is @ queenofbohemia.art ! Follow me there, if you want to! It’s empty at the moment but I’ll slowly start uploading new stuff very soon.

- Same with Twitter. Follow me @ QUEENOFBOHEMlA (copy and paste because the big “i” is actually a small “L”) if you want to! :D

- Content. Let’s talk about content. I’m sorry if you followed me for some specific fandom stuff that I’ve delivered only a few times and then switched to another obsession. That’s just how my weird brain works. I can’t keep drawing the same subjects and using the same style for more than a few months because I just get bored and frustrated, and it always ends up with me failing to make and upload new art at all. So... let’s pass that, shall we? I don’t have a distinctive style as many great artists on this platform and probably will never have one. I’m just here for funsies, ya feel me? Haha, alright. That’s it. 

- Also if you wanna follow my side blog just for fun, memes, fandom stuff and relatable content, here you go @queenofbohemia

Have a nice one, lads! See you soon!

[chrisrainicorn]

Opening Commissions!

I’m giving a shot at opening commissions! Wanted to do this for a while, and since I still have a lot of days of winter break ahead of me, now it’s the perfect time.

More info under the cut! If you’re not interested, a simple reblog is appreciated! :D

I have two art styles you can choose from, one being more cartoony and less detailed (simpler lines, simpler shading). For this simpler style, the lines and coloring will be made with a pencil-like brush only, the full-body examples up there are old-ish drawings from before I realized this setting worked better with this style.

For more examples, you can check my art tag or my DA (same username, link in my bio).

If you’re interested, contact me at christinesspala@gmail.com. Specifying the following:

Your Tumblr URL

Commission attributes (Art Style, Bust/Half/Full Body, Line/Flat/FullColor)

Extra additions if any (there is no limit for additions for now, but I won’t take anything that I know it’s going to be too much for me)

Character References (especially if OC or if you want a specific accessory/clothing/setting)

Pose of Preference

Expression of Preference

Full Description of what you have in mind! Don’t spare any details and, please, try to be as clear as possible - english is not my first language.

Payment through Paypal only. If your character design is too complex, the price can go up a bit. But I’ll make sure to send to you the final price before emailing the Paypal invoice.

The full payment has to be upfront. Paypal charges me a fee for every international transaction, so if I split, that amount would be discounted twice.

You can suggest changes during the sketching phase. After I start the lines, you will still get updates on the progress, but any extra requests for modifications will be charged.

My drawing process usually doesn’t take longer than a week, it can happen though, especially if the drawing is more complex. But if life gets in the way and causes any big delays, you will be notified.

I don’t know if many people will be interested, so there’s no set amount of available slots for now. I’ll probably work in one drawing at the time – first-come, first-served.

After complete, I retain the rights to post the artwork wherever I need. You can repost it on your own social media, all I ask then is to be credited! The artwork is for your personal use only - no reselling.

If you have any questions, feel free to send me an ask or email! And thank you for reading!

[daresplaining]

Daredevil Countdown: 8 Days

Trailer #1 Analysis

    We barely had time to recover from Iron Fist Season 2 before Netflix started dumping Daredevil content on us, and it’s been tough to keep up! We were away minding our own business at NYCC when this trailer dropped, and we’ve only just started to pick through it. There are some major revelations in this thing, which I’m very excited about. There are also a few scenes excerpted here that we saw in their entirety at NYCC, so while I’ll try to keep spoilers to a minimum, expect some minor ones.

    Is it geeky to get a kick out of Matt saying this? Because this makes me really happy. He has spent so much time struggling with his superhero identity that just hearing him call himself Daredevil is thrilling. Also, the background seems to suggest that he’s in the church, and may therefore be saying this to Maggie... which is good, because in one of the scenes we saw at NYCC, she called him “the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen” and I nearly pitched a fit. 

    We saw this scene, so I won’t go into details... beyond saying that it kicks off what sounds like will be an interesting (read: upsetting) relationship between Fisk and the FBI, and as well as Fisk’s manipulation of the justice system and the city as a whole this season. He is getting out of prison and aiming to reclaim  his throne, and this trailer gives us hints of some of the pawns he will be using to make that happen. 

    Hey look, it’s Rosalie Carbone!

    And we’ve mentioned it before, because it’s been in a bunch of the promos, but it’s great to finally have Fisk in his comics-accurate white suit! He looks great. 

    We’re also finally getting Sister Maggie! In the comics, of course, Maggie is Matt’s long-lost mother. In the show, we know that she works at the orphanage where Matt ended up after Jack’s death, and that she will be providing him some degree of emotional support (not to mention medical help...) following his near-death experience under Midland Circle. Their relationship is very strange, and in the comics they’ve spent a long time trying to negotiate their dynamic. They go back and forth on their degree of emotional closeness (depending on the writer), and while they will likely never have a parent/child relationship in the traditional sense, they do hold deep significance in each other’s lives. Whether that will become true in the show remains to be seen, but at the very least, Maggie will clearly act as a confidante for Matt during this difficult time. 

    This is one of several highly intriguing interactions between Matt and Fisk in this trailer. The surveillance is particularly interesting. It ties into the suggestion later in the trailer that Fisk will develop some control over media surveillance (in the comics he buys his own radio station during Chichester’s run). It also gives me a small amount of hope that we might get expert media manipulator Jonathan Powers (AKA the Jester) in the show, because that would be really cool. But why is Matt in a doctor’s office in a suit? The framing of this scene is great, and I really need to know what’s going on here. 

    Matt channeling that Stick vibe is something I never knew I needed. And this is another intriguing interaction between these two. What is the context here? For now, I love how cocky Matt sounds in this clip. Clearly, his spirit has not been broken (yet?) by this point. 

    At NYCC, there was some mention of a scene that would rival the hallway scene from Season 1. This may be it. I’m already pumped about this, because I love when Matt fights in civvies! If I were to guess what was going on here, I’d assume these are prisoners in Fisk’s pocket who have been instructed to take Matt out. This has serious “Devil in Cell Block D” (a story arc in which Matt is sent to prison) vibes, and that is very exciting. Whether or not the actual story draws from that arc, just a reference to the tone or basic concept would be awesome. 

    After two full seasons of teasing, we’re finally getting a Gladiator origin! Back in our Season 2 countdown, I wrote a post detailing Melvin Potter’s story in the comics, hoping that it would be adapted soon. The show has already laid down several key elements of his character: his vulnerability (particularly in regards to being manipulated by the people around him) and the tug-of-war between his gentle nature and his capacity for violence. In the comics, many of Melvin’s most compelling stories cover this struggle, as Matt and Betsy Beatty (Melvin’s social worker-turned-girlfriend) attempt to help him suppress the dangerous, out-of-control side of himself. As we see later in the trailer, Fisk is going to start using Melvin for his own ends again this season, thus pushing him to protect himself and Betsy by becoming the Gladiator. 

    Yet another oddly candid moment between Matt and Fisk. This is so uncanny that I almost wonder if it’s a hallucination. It’s also worth noting Matt’s lack of sunglasses in these scenes. In both the comics and the show, the glasses serve Matt as a type of mask, and his scenes are given an added layer of intimacy and exposure when he takes them off. Regardless of context, it’s clear that Fisk will be seeing Matt this season at his most vulnerable, with all facades and pretext removed. Which brings us to that quote... 

    Get excited, because it looks like we’re finally getting some big deal Daredevil Secret Identity Shenanigans(TM)! Matt having his secret identity exposed is a longtime Daredevil tradition; such a pervasive plot point that even Matt has begun joking about it. 

Daredevil vol. 3 #7 by Mark Waid, Paolo Rivera, and Javier Rodriguez

    Going all the way back to the Mike Murdock Saga in the 60s, Matt has struggled with keeping his double life hidden-- a surprisingly challenging task for a blind guy without outwardly obvious superpowers. Ben Urich figured it out through research and deduction, and while he has remained loyal in keeping Matt’s secret, a fellow reporter once nearly stole his notes and made them public. In “Born Again”, the Kingpin found out and used the information to ruin his life. Later, one of the Kingpin’s underlings sold the information to the FBI, which then made its way into the newspapers. Recently, with his secrets being used as blackmail, Matt decided to make his identity public. He has gone to extreme lengths over the years-- faking his death, lying under oath, creating various alternate personalities-- to protect his dual identity, and the thought of seeing him finally faced with this same challenge in the show is very exciting.

Melvin: “I don’t like it. I know who you work for, Felix. And the Kingpin is never up to anything good.”

Felix: “What is there not to like, Potter? You construct costumes. I am heretowith commissioning from yourself a costume. Said costume being one you are infinitely familiar with-- during such time frame as before you did renunciate your status as a prominent member of the criminal class to open this shop within which we now converse. Speaking of this most neatly custodiated establishment, we will summarily execute its premature demolition-- not to mention the removement [sic] of your most valued body parts-- should you perchance fail to render unto us a perfect duplicate of the uniform of a certain Man Without Fear.”

Daredevil vol. 1 #230 by Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, and Christie Scheele

    As we know, that’s going to be Bullseye’s costume. This is a combination of two plot points: one from “Born Again” (above) in which Fisk commissions a DD suit from Melvin to give to a convicted murderer, who he sends to kill Foggy, and one from Nocenti’s run in which Bullseye himself runs around causing chaos as Daredevil. 

    As indicated above (and just like he attempted in Season 1), Fisk is out to ruin Daredevil (and maaaaybe also Matt Murdock?)’s reputation, even more than Matt might manage all on his own.   

    This is a terrifying image, because it brings to mind Karen’s funeral in “Guardian Devil”. But a bunch of the people in the audience are smiling, so hopefully not...  

    ...Unfortunately, they’re still screwed. Bullseye in the church is both a “Guardian Devil” reference and (even better) a movie reference!

    We were shown this scene at NYCC, and it is awesome! I can’t wait for everyone to see it, so that I can talk about what makes it so great. It’s an absolutely killer fight scene that emphasizes just how intense Bullseye is as an opponent when handled well. And I’m not going to spoil this moment in particular... All I’ll say is that it’s something we’ve all been waiting for for two damn seasons, and when it happened at the panel, the whole room screamed. 

    *Cough* Don’t worry, that’s not Bullseye. 

    Also, there is not nearly enough Foggy and Karen in this trailer. 

Bullseye: “Yup! I’m Daredevil now. I wonder-- it’s been easy to play the bad guy-- maybe too easy. Be kinda fun to play the hero. After all, I am Daredevil!”

Daredevil vol. 1 #290 by Ann Nocenti, Kieron Dwyer, and Steve Buccellato

    As mentioned above, Bullseye will be prompted by Fisk to run around as Daredevil, ruining Matt’s reputation. Both actors have talked a little bit about Fisk’s manipulation of Dex, and the fact that this will play a large part in the latter’s turn to villainy. In the final arc of her run, Ann Nocenti penned a story in which Bullseye and Daredevil switched costumes, resulting in an intense exploration of villainy and heroism, and of their bizarre relationship as nemeses. In the show, it should be fun-- and probably a little horrifying too-- to see how this jumbling of identities affects how Matt and Dex see themselves and each other. 

    T-minus one week!