#dontchaknow

[anxiousapplepie]

before I bury myself any deeper into penguins and vegetarian polar bears, I wanted to yeet any extra IO sketches I made into the void

[one-winged-dreams]

I swear to god if this pulls me back into my bleach era

[feykrorovaan]

I love Filer Jun and her little Midwestern mom accent.

[flowergirlmiwa]

I'm a Minnesotan but call it soda instead of pop. I'm so fucked up and wrong. I can't even get myself to call it pop I want to be folksy dontchaknow I wanna be cool, why can't I be cool? Why can't I be great?

[burinazar]

i’ve actually been abyssposting nonstop this week but nearly all on Twitter and most of that in circle tweets. but like. it’s been a lot. i tried to screencap some of it and post it under the cut for those of you who might have a three sages and/or belavue brain cell but aren’t follow my fandom twt. honestly guys it’s a mess

like

help

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and also this

[bookshelfpassageway]

Tryna get back on some like, low stakes doodling, that somehow I still put too much effort in. RIP. Done in one sitting though. Anyway, once Eugene's campaign wraps, we get to do a yeehaw cowboyland spinoff in the same universe in a place called The Gulch. This is, 99.5%, going to be my guy when we do that. I might fiddle with the color palette I'm not sure, I'm so used to Colours Georg Gene He's short, he's tired, he's been in a continual state of Going Through it since the beginning of time, no one knows what his actual face looks like, and he'll probably do almost any crime for the right price so he can continue to get by (that vibe is pending, we'll see). His name might be Fisher.

[majorxmaggiexboy]

can anyone tell me how the goncharov is actually pronounced tho bc i have been jared 19 for a couple weeks and am Clueless

[lainpsx]

if i could smoke everything would be fine

[waffled0g]

Everyone gets “The 90s” look wrong and I hate it

Couple years ago I saw these two board games at the store back to back. Well, not saw them per se, but ya know. Spied them out of the corner of my eye. And for a moment without reading the text, I couldn’t tell you which was which decade at first. Funny. Either they were in a rush to get these out the door or they wanted their throwback trivia game boxes to look uniform. I didn’t think too much of it.

Only, from then on I started seeing it MORE. Every time someone markets a 90s or 80s throwback...

Goddammit they’re identical! What??! How did we let this happen? As a 90s survivor and a designer, this drives me up a wall.

Look, I know I’m late to the party to complain about “the 90s look” when we’re just starting to get sick of the Y2K nostalgia train. But c’mon, the 90s were not The 80s: Part Two™ 

Trust me when I say that we weren’t all wearing neon trapezoids up until the year 2000. The 90s look being peddled is so specific to the tail end of the 80s and an early early part of the 90s - a part of the 90s when it wouldn’t stop being the 80s. This is Memphis design being conflated with the wrong decade.

Keep reading for a long ass graphic design history lesson and pictures of old soda and fast food.

Specifically, the look is Memphis Milano, self-named by the Italian design house Memphis Group. Starting in the early to mid 80s, they made all sorts of furniture, fabrics and sculptures that were like a Piet Mondrian grid painting under heavy radiation. Their whole deal was defying the standards of existing industrial design up to that point on purpose. Chairs had weird arches, bookcases would be in strange alien colors, unusual materials like plastic or elastic were used in place of metal or wood, that sorta thing.

Memphis quickly became the signature look for the decade. You can tell something’s influenced by Memphis design from it’s telltale trademarks:

Clashing, neon colors.

Use of diametric shapes.

Contrasting patterns like zebra print stripes, confetti squiggles and checkerboards.

It wasn’t long before Memphis Milano-inspired design was everywhere in 80s pop culture:

It was a special time, yes.

I was a kindergartener at the tail end of the 80s, so I knew Memphis mostly through the lens of kids media. Toys, clothes, games, tv shows used it like candy colored catnip. Cable channel Nickelodeon more or less adopted the Memphis aesthetic as their signature in-house style and practically built a monument to it at a Florida theme park:

I think this is why folks mistake what decade Memphis is representative of - 90s staples like Nick, Saved By The Bell, Fresh Prince - they all stayed around much longer than the design trend’s expiration date. 

Couple that notion with the fact that companies are slow followers to design trends. Something gets popular and they want to get on the bandwagon? Gotta wait for the ink to dry, gotta wait for the production molds to be made. It would take a few years for them to completely work Memphis outta their system.

Now, this is not to say Memphis is bad! Personally I’m a fan of the aesthetic, if my neon-drenched artwork wasn’t a tip-off already. But it is a trend, and trends never last forever.

So what took the Memphis Milano look down for good? This part’s up for debate, but I personally think it had something to do with this dude:

It’s that grunge music from Seattle that’s so popular with the kids these days dontchaknow.

Once Smells Like Teen Spirit hit in 1991, the Nirvana tone drove the rest of the decade. Clean geometry became weathered, grainy and organic. Bright neon pastels became more bold. Bubblegum pop music sounded fake and manufactured. Attitude and apathy was authentic. Whatever.

Things got grungy. Things got grimy. Olestra was invented.

I think the best way to visualize this transition is how Cherry Coke entered the decade and how it left it:

1992 Memphis on the left, 1998 grunge junkie on the right. Fitting that the 90s would end with a design that looked like Darth Maul’s lungs.

Okay, so what should 90s retro design look like?

Continue on to PART TWO! Spoilers: No VHS filters or vaporwave needed, but maybe bring an antacid.

[lizardsfromspace]

Getting into silent film history is frustrating bc first you'll learn that around mid-century, when history of silent film began, they had access to relatively few films, and so a lot of misconceptions resulted from that ignorance. They only had D.W. Griffith and few other early films, so they assigned him Great Man relevance over all basic filmmaking. Even things like "everyone assumed Marion Davies was a talentless hack propped up by William Randolph Hearst bc they wrongfully thought a character in Citizen Kane was based on her, and had none of her films to go off of" (Orson Welles hated that one and repeatedly tried to correct it, btw)

But now, with more access to silent film than any time since the silent era, literally all the misconceptions still exist and are widespread bc no one bothers to watch all those films. We can increase access, but we can't make film teachers not just show Birth of a Nation (or, let's be honest, clips from Birth of a Nation) in utter isolation from the rest of early film and call it a day, oh and next we'll cover Intolerance, which is an apology for the racism our class downplayed, dontchaknow (it isn't)

[fishing-lesbian-catgirl]

I wish my Wisconsin accent was worse. I wish I said all the you betchas and dontchaknows, it’d be funny to have the full on yooper accent and everything, I think I sound too normal

[creekfiend]

(non-american) what's self pay akdkskdmg

that's when you ain't got insurance lmfao

I have Regular health insurance but not dental bc teeth are luxury bones dontchaknow

[https-chaos]

so when i went to the meet and greet at ben's show, it was in chicago and it was about 53° out. and he was hardcore complaining about being cold. it took everything in me not to be like "are you trying to summon minnesota? oh come on now, anything above 50 is shorts weather, dontchaknow."

[mylordshesacactus]

I got to do some like, legit atmospheric horror work a month or so back.

The party, after ditching the giant dragon turtle, was making their way through the forest in search of a small village they’d seen from its back--the only sign of civilization. Their unicorn friend Albion had dropped them in a region of the faewild he said contained a trusted ally--but no one had come to find them, and they need to get moving, so the village is as good a place to start as any.

Along the way they ran into a pair of charming rabbitfolk brothers named Brush and Briar, struggling on the side of the road to right a partially-smashed cart. After cautious, exact-words exchanges in which Max the bard did some serious work to make the party appear nonthreatening and avoid accidentally imposing a debt, the brothers explained that they were from the nearby village of Little Ivywood, and they’d been attacked by bandits on the road and nearly lost all their worldly possessions because the bandits accused them of “betraying their queen”. They explain that Little Ivywood surely has some pro-mortal sentiments, but that certainly neither of them have betrayed any queens!

The party, who were headed that way anyway, of course take the brothers under their wing and help them get their cart back to the village. Along the way they chat about the faewild, about the bandit problem (bandits are described as “bestial” and there are claw marks on the cart), about how about 20% of their carrots “bite back” and it’s very offputting, dontchaknow, but such eternal suffering does seem to be somethin’ of our people’s lot in life.

So they pass several pleasant hours before coming up on the village of Little Ivywood.

The............very....very. Quiet. Village of Little Ivywood.

Max and Andromeda are the first to see the bodies in the fields.

The party puts Brush and Briar behind them and--in a moment that made me the DM ache over how recently they were a ragtag bunch of misfits half of whom had never taken a life before--do a VERY professional check-and-clear sweep of the village. It’s...bad. If there are survivors, they’re nowhere near.

The wounds are grisly, and the attack was...thorough. Nimbus the ranger finds the marks of boots and cloven hooves in the dirt, but is having trouble checking trailsign--he grew up in a village just like this. While checking houses, Audie the wizard finds a cellar door thrown open with the bloody body of one rabbit dead on the floor outside it, and a rug thrown aside under the trapdoor--someone who gave his life to hide his family, only to have them die anyway.

Andromeda, the aarakocra paladin, stays in the air on overwatch. While checking the perimeter, she sees a glimmer in the treeline and drops down to check--expecting to find enemy scouts coming back for stragglers, or perhaps an injured survivor taking shelter in the hedgerow, and finds--

Snares.

Iron running snares, set in between rows of crops, paths in the hedgerows, along gaps in the underbrush. A cruel, condescending kind of joke--the kind of perimeter you set up when you intend for no one, not a single living rabbitfolk, to escape the slaughter. 

With no small amount of guilt, the party takes what they can from the homes--they haven’t been looted, this wasn’t a bandit raid. And then--something moves.

The trio of liondrakes emerges all spite and fury; held at bay by the heavily-armed party but hissing insults, calling Brush and Briar traitors, demanding to know why the party would defend them, swearing to kill them all in the name of their queen or die trying. And something--doesn’t add up. The liondrakes scoff at the idea of serving the Courts--it was the Summer Court, they say, who killed these people, and their own queen, the Queen of the Wilds, who tried to save them. They say, again, that the party is harboring traitors, and...

and it’s Nim who makes the 20+ insight check.

Brush and Briar lived in Little Ivywood. They were farmers, not merchants. So, on the night their families and neighbors were slaughtered by the Summer Court...

What were they doing in the middle of the woods with all of their worldly possessions?

[frasier-crane-style]

Read a couple things from Kindle Unlimited.

Chariot is essentially an entry in the powered armor subgenre, only with a car instead of a suit. Guy finds car at junkyard, it turns out to be a talking spy car possessed by the lady spy that was killed in it, bad guys want the car back… it wasn't bad, per se, but just nothing in there that was new or interesting. The car thief with the estranged wife, the kid who needs medical treatment, the loan shark the hero needs to pay back… even the synthwave look of the thing is essentially a take-off on Drive. All in all, it comes off like a failed pitch for a Knight Rider reboot--and brother, if your pitch isn't good enough for a Knight Rider reboot, you might wanna call it a day.

The Nice House By The Lake: I'm sure this has fans, but to me it was boring, boring, boring. At the end of twelve issues, nothing has happened and no new information has been revealed. The focus isn't really on mystery or horror, but on characters, and these are some bland-ass characters. Twelve is too many people, they all blur together like they're all the same vapid person repeated over and over again (it doesn't help that the narrative willy-nilly swaps between their real names and nicknames), and having countless flashbacks about how "OH, this guy knows Walter from high school, but THIS GUY knows him from college!" did not interest me in the slightest. This honestly probably would've worked better as a novel. The art seems wholly pointless: at various points, there just isn't any art, and the plot is progressed by transcript of the characters speaking to each other! I just wanted something to happen, some real drama, and the way the author eventually forces a climax onto this aimless narrative is unbelievably contrived.

It doesn't help that I recently watched The Last Island, which covers a similar narrative, but with much more well-rendered characters, more interesting goings-on, and in under two hours.

American Ronin: Sort of a silly attempt at a spy thriller where it's a cyberpunk future, so characters can use DNA to 'empathize' with other characters and basically become them personality-wise (because that's stored in DNA, dontchaknow), like a speed-run of Will Graham's act in Hannibal. Conveniently, pretty much every character is a walking bundle of tics, neuroses, and fetishes, which allows someone with the 'radical empathy' superpower to instantly push someone else to suicide. If this all seems way less effective than just shooting someone (since all they use the radical empathy thing for is to kill each other), it's because the hero is really set on using this DNA thing. Almost as if this were all a leftover character concept from Milligan's X-Statix, but he lost a bet and has to play it straight.

It's interesting enough, up to a point, and not too pretentious, even with art that seems to be competing with Dave McKean to obscure rather than delineate what's going on (and this being a spy thriller, it's kinda important to be able to tell the characters apart and see what's happening and so on). But if you can suspend your disbelief enough to invest in this wacky future where everyone just has to use this empathy malarky, it wastes time well enough.

[chiisana-sukima]

ive actually been thinking about it a lot since i posted that and i agree with you that general rape culture is part of the reason people don't notice that sam gets sexually assaulted

like the scenes that are cut and dry sexual assault scenes (no magic. no hell. no magic potion shit) usually portray the woman like a black widow/femme fatale type i.e meg in nightmare and we're so used to seeing those scenes that they don't even register because its the idea that women get their power from sex and being attractive ya know?

so i do think it's less that male victims are played as jokes since most of the time i think the scenes are played pretty straight (for the most part, they guy in tall tales is a big exception and there are sooooo many rape jokes but actual scenes, we usually see sam and dean as not enjoying these things and the audience are meant to root for them to get away so) and more that we're just used to the idea that this is the way women *can* intimidate men ya know?

(also feel free not to answer if you dont feel comfortable <3)

Yup, I think everything you said here is 100% true, and that there are other factors at play too that fit under the "rape culture" umbrella.

You absolutely will not believe some of the insane, hardcore rape apology shit people will say to me in defense of pretend SA in a silly TV show, even after they know I'm a survivor. Because of the demographic of spn Tumblr fandom, most of these conversation partners are liberal women or AFAB nbs. And apparently honestly unaware what they're saying is deeply offensive and horrifying. Some of them are legitimately Sam fans. And to make matters even more tragic, often they are survivors themselves.

Mostly I think we are all--all genders included--afraid. Afraid we could lose control of our bodies, our relationships, our home inside the vessel where we store our Self. It makes us so defensive that to have someone talk about it without subterfuge is seen as a threat rather than an act of human fellowship.

And then as one big part of the defense against that fear, we often emotionally accept--even if intellectually we know it's not true--the pervasive lie that strong, upstanding people can't be raped, and especially that men can't be raped unless there is something so fundamentally wrong with them that they no longer count as part of the social category "men". And we accept the converse lie too; that good people can't rape, and therefore if someone isn't 100% irredeemable the sexual assault alleged by their victim can't really have happened. I see this in fandom with both on-screen and off-screen SA, with SA jokes, and across male and female perpetrators.

A couple examples under the cut. The cut is there in case you aren't a masochist and don't like the feeling of needing eyeball bleach.

SA happens because you're a bad person:

Tbf to OP, post one is liveblogging 12x02, where we don't know immediately that it's SA. Otoh they felt no need to liveblog the reveal that Sam wasn't in fact a dirty whore who was fucking his torturer because he's just that slutty. And the later post on why Sam gets sexually assaulted so often, is not substantially different reasoning

Or maybe it's not SA at all. Because you're a bad person and also crazy (italics at the beginning are a quote from me):

It's not rape if I like the rapist, plus bonus you made me do it because you're a bad person:

And the all time, best ever, gold metal winners, from Mark P and Sebastian Roche:

Video of the panel is gone, but there is contemporaneous liveblogging:

This is from a con in January 2015. Sooooo right after O Brother Where Art Thou when Lucifer made the rape joke/threat while Sam cried. Could totally have been consensual though, because Lucifer isn't as bad as people make him out to be, dontchaknow. And Mark P is a nice guy who respects women (lol), so obviously it wasn't a rape joke. He would never. (┛`д´)┛彡┻━┻