#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.

[one-winged-dirty-dreams]

Listen, I'm just saying, if you're a giant bear of a man, you're ASKING for your tiny wife to use those nimble fingers to give you an earthshattering prostate orgasm.

[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.

[one-winged-dreams]

fuck it, we ball

go ahead and do this if you want, idk

New picrew chain idea: yourself vs what you looked like as a kid

Free for anyone to join in

Link

[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."

[ultrafuturist]

mourning a mirrored soul

part of the reason why i've avoided tumblr so long is because it's always felt like a place a more innocent, socialized and accepted version of myself would've felt at home. in my tweens it was looking like i could maybe be a weirdo but peaceably, without the abuse of ages 7-10. maybe the rough patch was over.

i didn't end up here in that time, hadn't heard of the place, barely had a computer. by the time i was really online i was a teenager and ready to die. the joy of the tumult of a chain of false diagnoses and brutal hospitalizations ending gave way to the dread realization that this was life forever- solitude, joylessness, isolation, alienation, and the lobotomy drugs that if i ever refused i was sure would see me raped again. when i finally rebelled it was off to the camps.

but in that window of time, that tweenage lull, i can see some spark of hope and joy, transient and brief, bound up in memories of bionicles and repressed jealousy of the emo girls who still existed in those days. i had a soul once.

every time i experience tumblr first or secondhand i am forced to confront the fact that that joyous spark was a fucking imbecile rich kid in the making, the sort of save the whales girlie i rag on endlessly for their subconscious fascism and petty bourgeois insularity. i'm a decent and upstanding friend of the people because i was tortured into it.

i don't want to defend my abusers. frankly i think they should have their hearts ripped out atop Chichen Itza. it just doesn't make much sense to abuse a child because they might grow up to be a conformist otherwise. i wouldn't wish it on the conformists here.

the world burns and people here are happy, moisturized, in their fandom lanes. its skilltober, dontchaknow? here's more art of two fictional men chastely kissing. if you were kicked around less, maybe that'd satisfy you too.