#i love how its similar in style to my drawing while still having more texture and detail and variety in tones- it really looks like a more

[dimeadozencows]

:DDDD

I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before

I put my lips to the hands of the man who killed my son

[reedeemable]

DBH Children Headcanons

Just like to preface this by saying that I love making fan-children for my favourite ships so I don’t care about “oh they wouldn’t have kids” or “this doesn’t make sense”. This is for my own amusement so just letting you know before you go on.

Also, I can't draw for shit but if people like my dbh children and want to see more, I will make them on the Sims or online (dress up games) and post them here. Let me know if that's something that would be of interest. I'll also answer asks about them and whatever if anyone is interested

Taglist for those who said that they were interested in my headcanons: @sundownridge @kristopher-1105 @dbhstruggleposting @glass-noodle @fearlessjones @heiko-goes-detroit

Connor + Hank

Name: Nicole (named after Cole)

Birthday: May 21st (gemini)

Appearance: She has Hank’s eyes and Connor’s hair. Her hair is fluffy/curly (like Bryan’s hair) and its shoulder length, tied into a ponytail (she also has a fluffy/curly fringe similar to Connor’s)

Other features: She has Connor’s freckles (not exact but similar) and wears glasses (inspired by the popular headcanon that human Connor wears them)

Info/Background: So, my headcanon for their child is that Connor is the one who asks Hank if they can have a child. Connor has been seeing other androids having their own families and he wants one as well. He would never pressure Hank into this but Hank agrees of his own volition and even though he’s older now, a part of him wants to try again. They have a baby via science (it’s the future, doesn’t need to make sense, haha) Because it is through science, they’re able to give her Connor’s hair and freckles but her facial features (skin, shape of eyes, nose etc) come from Hank’s dna.

Personality: - Ok so, for their daughter, I headcanon her to be someone who is adventurous and loves to have fun. She loves being outdoors, being active and anything athletic, like sports and dancing - She loves the heat and hates the cold (this is a nod to how cole died) - Even though her name is Nicole, she prefers the name Nicky (Hank called her that in the beginning because he couldn't bear to say "cole" yet and it just stuck) - She knows different forms of self-defence, mainly due to Connor's influence and she loves it. She can pull of moves that even has Connor going "damn" - She smiles a lot, like a lot a lot. Very rarely will you ever see her not smiling and laughing

Favourites: - Colour: Pink/blues - Symbol: Heart

Jericrew

Name: Riley (named after Markus’ removed romantic interest, Riley)

Birthday: November 9th (scorpio)

Appearance: Similar to her game counterpart, except her braid goes down her back instead of to the side (to distinguish her from north but in my head, she wears her hair like north's because she admires her so much) and she has grey eyes (this is a nod to her eyes being blurred out in her images)

Info/Background: Riley is left at New Jericho’s doorstep. Jericrew know that they should hand her over to humans but despite the positive aftermath of the revolution, they are still distrustful of humans. By time they decide what to do, they have already fallen for her. After caring for her for a while, Markus is inspired to fight for androids rights to adopt human children. Of course, humans are not pleased about this and there is a huge argument and debate around it but eventually it is legalised and she becomes part of their family.

Personality: So, even though her personality isn't touched upon at all, I've come up with some traits from the information and pics shown in Riley's wiki - Becomes an artist (inspired by Markus) - Good listener and advisor - Self-confident and assured - Into the boho style - Loves plants and flowers - Well-educated (this part comes from Josh, who would have taught her a lot)

Favourites: - Colour: Jade - Symbol: Chevron

Markus + Simon

Name: Milo

Birthday: July 8th (cancer)

Appearance: He is African American with short brown Afro-textured hair, shaved at the sides and light brown eyes

Info/Background: Milo is adopted by Markus and Simon after Riley grows up a bit. I imagine that because Simon is a domestic droid, he loves kids and once Riley becomes older, he aches for having a little one around the house again.

Personality: - Him being into fashion and dressing cool (since people love how Markus and Simon dress) is always something that I've liked - Combination of Markus and Simon's traits (determined, loyal, soft etc etc)

Favourites: - Colour: Dark pink

Leo + KL900

Name: Scarlett (named after Carl)

Birthday: August 15th (leo)

Appearance: So, because she was created through science, she looks like Leo and a KL900 combined. (edit: changed her hair colour and style). She has brown hair like Leo's which is short and curly (similar to Lucy's concept design) and Leo's eyes

Info/Personality: So, a little backstory on this crack-ship. Because KL900’s are created for social care, I headcanon that they have them in rehab centers. While at rehab, Leo meets a KL900 (which I have dubbed Kelly) and they fall for each other. Their daughter is born after Carl dies (of age) and Leo names her after him.

Personality: - Wants to become an actress - Has Leo's jealousy issues - Is confident in her abilities which makes her come off as a bit vain

Favourites: - Colour: Cyan - Symbol: Teardrop

Chris Miller

Name: Damian

Birthday: August 9th (leo)

Appearance: Ok this is just me but I headcanon that he dyes his hair part blonde during his teen years. I’m probably the only person whose given any thought about Damian’s appearance but ever since it entered by head, it won’t leave

Personality: - Ok, so because Chris' concept name was Chad, I headcanon Damian to be the definition of the slang meaning of a "chad" (but without all the assholishness that comes with it)

Favourites: - Colour: Beige

Name: Talia (name changed)

Birthday: June 30th (cancer)

Appearance: Chris’ hair/eye colour and Afro-textured hair that falls down to her shoulders

Info/Background: Not much to say except that I headcanon that he would have another child somewhere down the line

Personality: - She has a very "airy" personality. Like air, she's light, bouncy, free and just chill to get along with. She's gentle, caring, respectful and kind - Cries easily

Favourites: - Colour: Violet - Symbol: Butterfly

Gavin + Nines

Name: Curtis (named after Gavin’s concept name. Also Curtis means “polite/courteous and given Gavin’s personality, I think that is hilarious 😂)

Birthday: September 18th (virgo) (birthday changed cause I realised I had the wrong date/star sign)

Appearance: He has Gavin’s eyes and Nines’ hair colour. His hair is a combination of Bryan’s curly hair and Gavin’s hair from the reed900 movies (I haven’t watched them but I’ve seen a lot of fan-art with Gavin’s hair drawn like his and it seems appropriate to give his son that hairstyle) Because it is through science, they’re able to give him Nines’ hair and freckles but his facial features (skin, shape of eyes, nose etc) come from Gavin’s dna.

Other features: He has Nines’ freckles (not exact but similar)

Info/Background: I headcanon that after Nicole is born, Nines and Gavin both get baby fever and want a child as well. Science baby, of course.

Personality: - So, I know that this isn't original but I like the idea of Gavin's kid being the opposite of him. Curtis is polite, courteous, well-behaved, never swears, humble, friendly, sociable, charming, funny, everyone who meets him just thinks he's so nice etc etc - But in saying that, there a few traits he gets from Gavin. He is ambitious and an over-achiever. He's not bookish per-say but wants to do his best at anything he tries - I know I said he never swears but that's more in general. He will swear if he's mad or if he hurts himself by accident (stubbing his toe etc) - Also, his first word was "phck" much to shock of both Nines and Gavin, the latter swearing black and blue that he never said it in front of him (he did)

Favourites: - Colour: Green

Tina + ST300

Name: Katie

Birthday: October 19th (libra)

Appearance: She has Tina’s eyes and Staci’s (my name for the st300) hair that is shoulder length and tied into two low pigtails

Other features: She has freckles like Staci

Info/Background: A couple years after Gavin and Nines have their child, Tina and Staci decide to have one through science as well. Because it is through science, they’re able to give her Staci’s hair and freckles but her facial features (skin, shape of eyes, nose etc) come from Tina’s dna.

Personality: - I headcanon that she has fanon Tina's personality. If you've ever read most reed900 fics, you'll know that Tina has been given the traits of "party-animal, doesn't take shit, loves to tease, always the optimism to Gavin's cynicism, always has her friend's backs etc" - Since we don't know much about canon Tina, I gave her fanon traits to Katie

Favourites: - Colour: Olive green - Symbol: Flower

Elijah + Chloe

Name: Adam (a nod to the first man on earth because Adam is the first human born from an android)

Birthday: February 3rd (aquarius)

Appearance: He has Eli’s hair colour (his original brown, not his dyed hair) and eye colour. His hair is half-shaven and swept to one side

Info/Background: I headcanon that Eli has been experimenting and he alters Chloe so that she is able to give birth to children. Eli tells no one until Chloe is pregnant. The world is informed and watches to see if it works. It does and even though only one was predicted to be born, they have twins. Because this is the first baby born through an android, only Kamski's dna is able to be used so he has his eyes, hair, facial features etc Personality: - Genius (like his father) - Relaxed and nonchalant. Not a serious person - Enjoys the spotlight and fame of not only being a Kamski but also being the first human born from an android - Frivolous with money - Social butterfly, loves being around people and going to parties - Loves being in public - Always in the media for somethingFavourites: - Colour: Blue

Name: Ava (a nod to Eve but the e’s are changed to a’s to be alliterate with Adam’s name)

Birthday: February 3rd (aquarius)

Appearance: She has Eli’s hair colour (his original brown, not his dyed hair) and eye colour. Her hair is long and styled into a high ponytail

Info/Background: Same as Adam’s

Personality: - Genius (like her father) - Business savvy and ambitious (I haven't picked a career for her yet but she becomes highly successful like Eli) - Workaholic - Stubborn - Studious - Unlike her twin, she is smart with money - Is wary of befriending people because of her fame and status - Prefers to keep her personal business private - Not a big fan of the media

Favourites: - Colour: Red - Symbol: Diamond

Name: Noah

Birthday: March 8th (pisces)

Appearance: He has Chloe’s hair and Eli’s eyes. He has long hair that falls to his shoulders

Info/Background: Ok, so originally he wasn’t supposed to exist but after coming up with his personality and why he exists, I couldn’t resist. So, the reason why he was born is because Chloe wanted a child that looked like her. Because she was the first android to have a child, only Eli’s dna was used so Adam and Ava only have Kamski dna. Noah is more mixed.

Other features: Wears glasses

Personality: - Genius (he is the smartest of the three children) - So personally, I don't believe that Eli is evil but I know that it's a popular interpretation in the fandom so I went with it for his son - He is sociopathic and sadistic. He is reclusive, hates humanity and only respects his mother and other androids - He hates his father (because eli didn't want another child but only did it because chloe wanted it so while noah and chloe are extremely close, he isn't close with his father at all) - Because he is the third Kamski child, he isn't paid as much attention to as the other two by the public because he doesn't go out or isn't venturing into the business scene so this has left him bitter and jealous of his siblings - Wants to lead another android revolution and believes that androids should be ruling the world, not humans - Is loyal, obedient and very nurturing towards Chloe - To me, if I was a fic writer, Noah is someone who would be the big bad so his fate is that he would either end up dying or going to jail

Favourites: - Colour: Purple

Other

So, I made this next character purely for the purpose of shipping her with another one of my character's, Nicole but I lover her so much now that even if I changed my mind, she's staying

Name: Samantha Stern

Birthday: October 28th (scorpio)

Appearance: She has human Amanda's facial features, hair and eye colour. Her hair is straight and long

Other features: She wears glasses

Info/Background: Samantha Stern is a relative of Amanda Stern (the human amanda). She lived in England until she moves to Detroit. She meets Nicole in her young adult years and she ends up being a kindergarten teacher. I'm 50/50 on this but I like her having a british accent

Personality: - She is the opposite of AI Amanda in every way - She is an open book, has a warm attitude towards everyone, open to change, can be absent minded at times, encouraging, understanding, forgiving, compassionate and gentle - She's also independent and prefers to make her own way in life - When it comes to clothing, she hates big/dangly, shiny jewelery, long sleeved clothing and loves wearing dresses, skirts and shorts

Favourites: - Colour: Yellow - Symbol: Star

[naughtynoodle056]

oh wtf did they mean by that like .. your characters are obviously Black - you could post just the lineart and it'd be obvious??

okay first of all I LAUGHED when I read this ask because I literally feel the exact same way, but allow me to take you and the rest of my followers on this journey that has made me decide I'm a villain now. Buckle up, this post will be lengthy xD.

Person (not artist) confused my OC Shay (the girl right next to Leo) for my OC Xander (the boy on the far left). I got really frustrated because I chose Shay to sit next to Leo in this piece SPECIFICALLY to drive home the contrast in weight and that even though Shay is in a baggyish hoodie, you can still tell she's slim compared to Leo.

I asked if I was just going crazy or if these people mixing them up werre either 1) visually impaired somehow or looked at this for 0.2 seconds because these are obviously not the same person?? an IRL said that Xander and Shay looked too similarly because of their hair and body type and SKIN TONE and I was like. First of all, 2000s emo kids often had similar hair, that's kind of the fucking point here. Second of all, Shay is obviously shorter and skinny and Xander is CLEARLY on the chubbier sie, so what the fuck are you yapping about? and FInally. SKIN COLOR??? SKIN COLOR??????

Here is this same exact piece but with the lighting effects turned off. Just loud and wrong as fuck

So aforementioned artist offers their constructive criticism that was this

and like no offense but the longer I thought about it the more pissed off I got because first of all,

I LITERALLY DO????? and second of all and the reason I'm evil now is that they don't. RECENTLY they actually drew a black person, but it was still a frustratingly ambiguously black person.

Like what does this even mean bro my art style is like ALL SHAPES?? Like I'm really glad you said what you said in this ask because you're so right, you CAN tell my characters are black or otherwise POC just by the lineart. You cannot do that with the artist that gave that criticism. and then they doubled down when people called them out on how wack of a criticism it was and that they were wrong. I won't be naming them by name publicly because like I said before, I will look like the smaller bitter artist that can't take criticism from this BIG POPULAR WELL MEANING artist, but it felt like they were throwing stones from a glass house at a BRICK ONE.

I was also told my art "has a lot of potential" which is the polite way of saying "your art is mid", generally speaking lmaO.

At the end of the day, it felt like they were making huge sweeping judgements of my art and offering criticsm that was like?? unwarranted and felt more like them outting themselves as never giving my art more than just a passing glance because I dont draw 800+lb fatties constantly. Which is fine, you don't have to look at my art. But don't fucking give me criticism that not only doesn't apply to me, but you don't even follow yourself. Its kind of like if an abled bodied artist who NEVER draws anyone with visible disabilities told a visibly disabled artist that DOES draw a myriad of disabled folks in a loving way that they aren't doing enough and then doubling down with "All criticism is fair critism".

I don't think I'm the best artist in the world or in this kink community, but I know one thing for sure. I'm one of the most consistent at drawing black people in a way that's obvious and with lots of love, so don't you EVER fucking imply I don't do enough while your black people just look like color pallete swaps. Don't come for me on that regard if you have never drawn afro textured hair. And no, I WON'T just roll over and accept that "most feedists favor white or pale eastern asain people". I'd rather die a niche artist who actually gives a shit about representation than to just grovel to people that would not respect me because of my race.

[dreamatduskk]

Hi! Would you happen to have recs for other blogs/artists like yourself? Or even just people who inspire you/your art?

hmm not sure if i can pick artists like myself (cuz its usually just one or two aspects i think are similar (my art is a big mashup of bits and pieces i love)) but i can def share some artists that inspire me! they'll mostly be on twitter tho cuz thats where i follow most of em ;p

@/Belial43157741 : super cool techwear/light mech elements to their art and great colors. their art usually has more minimalist shading which gives it a super clean look while still showing the form of the hard surface elements in their drawings

@/VibeStrike (NSFW) : love how soft their lines are and the shapes they use to draw bodies! once again someone who uses more minimal shading, although they tend towards softer/more blended colors/shadows which has a very soft and touchable look to it. i totally ripped off their paw style cuz i love it so much lol

@/Deceased_Bunny : their work was what got me to use that crispy ass binary brush and chromatic aberration more! I also really like the shapes they use for bodies and their art made me realize i could just give all my characters cute little paws lol. I love their little tableaus/scenes and how they can populate a room. great vibes

@/godbirdart : Their ref/outfits sheets were a huge inspiration for how i do a lot of my backgrounds. i love how they include a lot of icons/text in the layouts and it gives it this really sleek yet maximalist look, somehow balancing a lot of details while not distracting from the focal point of the characters

@/ISANANIKA : similar to prev, love their text layouts and more graphic approach especially with their work for Howl Out (their clothing brand)

@/scpkidd : love their character designs and how they can incorporate so many colors and hues in a piece while still having it look really harmonious. their use of textured brushes (especially in environments) def was one of the things that got me to start using procreate more

@/yapa_yappa : huge fan of their compositions that combine 3d models and 2d illustration/animated elements... not something i've done too much of yet but i really want to start experimenting with that combo more its such a cool effect

[kirazdaha]

HAHAHAHA Every Turk Family has one of those names and unironically mine does too 🫡 Tell your mother thank you she is a very lovely lady

I know all of the artists you listed below because my dad blasts them on the radio everytime we go out... I call it old people music but hey I never said it was bad, they're awesome and I might have memorised some of the artist's songs from how much I listen to them... Barış Manço is a classic without a doubt! Fun fact my parents were able to go to his concert and got a signed picture with him I will always envy how lucky they were 😭 I love how women in the industry made the most iconic songs I hear them often in weddings too! Or clubs, even though I only went to one once I'm not very fond of them...

My questions were do you have any tips or inspiration with how you draw! I love your art and artstyle and it's honestly what I've been trying to achieve for a while, I can't believe I'm learning how to draw men because of a silly lawyer show it's a disease...

(We are just having a conversation at this point) (I feel like those people who speak out loud in public) (I hope you and anyone who's reading this is having a good day :) be kind to yourself and others everyone)

OH MY GOD i envy them too😭😭 also omg that sounds like heaven to me. the other day i went out partying and i felt sooo out of place because i only knew like 3 songs. omg it was so so bad.

hmmm tips and inspiration…. my number 1 tip would definitely be to look at a lot of other artists you like and analyze what exactly you like. and then try to emulate that in your own work. i try to look for inspiration everywhere - artists online, traditional artists, old masters, 3d artists, even theatre and poetry, etc. - doesnt mean that i am equally inspired by them all (because all these things at once sound so scary and big but they really arent!) but rather, i try to be open for anything and that helps me find inspiration :) 

ill try to explain my thoughts more under the cut because this got long:

for me for example, so far i only posted some art i made that was lined (which, i would say makes up maybe half of the art i draw - i mostly sketch and recently have been building up the courage to paint more) and one of my inspirations is meltow. i think if you go over and check out their art youll definitely see it lol. but also i love the clean look some comics have and my friends tell me my art looks like it belongs in a comic which, i guess yeah :) when it comes to colors and composition i LOVE this artists works. i still have a lot to learn and just looking at their works inspires me so much!!!

i will say i have ALWAYS struggled with lineart. its probably the worst thing in the world to me because it never feels right!!! i like lining on paper with harsh inks and stiff ink nibs that allow for like. very little variety in line weight, but i havent done that in over 3 years (i hope i can get back to that). but yes, something about lineart makes me feel so icky when i use any brush that reacts to the pressure you put on your tablet LOL i just hate it. ugh. i havent been able to work it out.

it was only in 2020 i think that i decided to try it out with a thick brush with some texture and no pen pressure. that probably was the first time i got actual lineart that (at the time) i liked done. and then later on, discovering that other artists are able to achieve beautiful drawings with similar brushes AND that lining with a very simple brush can feel so satisfying helped me evolve a lot! until 2022, i actually wasnt able to give my art the kind of finished look that i wanted. so what people consider my style is really just born out of my limits and working with them. that obviously doesnt mean that i dont try to challenge myself as much as i can. i do and i think everyone should! thats what makes art so fun

if theres any good advice i can give to a beginner itd probaaaaably be. okay this is difficult and i feel like im not really qualified for this. as a hobbyist much less so because a lot of the knowledge and skills i acquired was through an intuitive process (i could never stick with habits such as regular studies or warmups or whatever is meant to be good for you) which definitely isnt the most “productive” way but i mean it doesnt have to be. its just a hobby! you dont have to perfect art. but yes, i would definitely say dont stop drawing. youll always be your harshest critic and at the beginning, and especially if you begin at an older age because youve been training your eye your whole life but your drawing skills for only a relatively short time you will notice a lot of mistakes. and youll think you wont achieve the image you have in your head. and maybe you wont (because youll always strive for more and youll never really be satisfied as an artist bla bla) for a while. but you have to keep drawing! try out different strategies, find out how other artists draw, watch speedpaints, try out different papers and pencils, try everything that makes it more fun and keep going! it will all pay off!! 

in my eyes theres also no point in saying “i should wait till im better to draw this idea i have” because if inspiration strikes you you should use that. even though i still sometimes catch myself thinking like that. you can always redraw things later on!! if theres anything that will keep you drawing you should use that! like getting into shows and games that make me want to draw helps a ton LOL people are not joking when they say getting obsessed with one character is the quickest way to improve. i 100% agree!!! if you saw my first nachos you wouldnt even recognize him. not kidding wow this got long. thank you for the questions though!! i hope some of my rambling can help you. feel free to talk to me whenever!

[fayas-maanimationblog]

Animatic Assignment

Learning 2 - The limitation of time

So now I had my list of Ideas, around 3-4 for 5 prompts that I had selected from the options and it was time to get to storyboarding them and this is when I ran into my next problem, time.

30 seconds seemed to be too short for most of my ideas, some would fit but moments of silence and suspense, moments of introspection would have had to be sacrificed to fit the timeframe which would have affected the overall storytelling.

this made me go back to the drawing board and I decided to first list out what would be the success criteria for the animatics i create will be:

Has to be in 30 seconds or max, to be under 35 seconds. this was quite important not only because this was the overall assignment objective but as a personal challenge for myself as I was used to longer forms of narrative storytelling which often can be a crutch. keeping the narrative under 30 seconds would be a good exercise in practicing simplicity which is the most important aspect of any artistic practice.

Has to be honest and personal. this was almost as important as the first criteria for myself due to prior experience of being in college, the fear of judgement that can creep in and how it ultimately affected the kind of art I ended up making. To make sure the stories I make ultimately reflect myself and me as an artist and not an imitation of someone else.

Use of Cinematic language. With the time being only 30 seconds, This was a good opportunity to be as Intentional as I could be with every second of the film and Intentionality makes good film!

with these identified I began watching and revisiting some animated and live action shorts which were on the shorter side, here are a few of them I liked:

I don't like you - vizkut

An animated short about a person that struggles in loving themselves but continues holding on to the few parts that give them any purpose.

This is a short that fit all my success criteria's, its 34 seconds, Its simple and is speaking an almost universal experience while still portraying it in a very personal and unique manner, It tells the story using the medium of animation in a way only animation can, unique character designs of a teal (considered to be a shy color) silhouette with only its facial features, abstract and texture filled backgrounds that gives it a somber and grim mood, keeping you engaged all the way.

Situationship - Webb Montgomery

This was a particularly influential one as watching this lead to me expanding on an idea that I had for a prompt which lead to my first animatic.

While "I don't like you" effectiveness comes from its quiet introspective mood "Situationship" effectiveness comes from being able to condense the timeline of a situationship that lasted a months or maybe years into 30 seconds. In fact, the pace in which the montage moves, while matching with the music gives you the feeling of the sentence "Time flies when you are having fun", adding a somberness and bittersweet feeling that would have less of a punch in a longer form.

The few negatives I would have if I am being nitpicky would be the art style which compared to I don't like you is a bit simplistic and common and the overall narrative and presentation of the idea being a bit mainstream as there are other examples of similar work of such montages, the most famous being the montage from UP. The film maybe more accessible but would have levelled up a bit more artistically had it been a bit more abstract in my opinion. However it can also be argued that its accessibility is its biggest strength since its the most viewed video on my list.

INCARNAT - SAOR

A short about a lamb going through the trials of death and consumption, this was definitely one of the most abstract work that I had ended up watching during my research.

The biggest success of this short would be the unique format of storytelling, using the frames to show multiple instances thereby being able to condense more information in the 30 second short. the art style that oozes cool and vintage which makes the images more digestible.

However going through the success criteria's I cant help but admit that I did not personally connect with it too much, the polished look and feel take away from the brutality I feel is required of the images and of the act of slaughter of a sheep from its own POV and how it would have been a bit more successful if the creator had played around with rougher and grosses textures to leave the audience with their skin crawling.

Are you going to hurt me? - TAEETIMEE

Are you going to hurt me? succeeds in the places where I felt INCARNAT suffered, where even though the images and the art style are quite simple it is filled with texture and grittiness that compliments the subject matter very well, The silence and inactivity of the characters only add to the intensity of the short and its ending while the bright, warm images provide a good juxtaposition to it.

______________________________________________________________

there were more but for the sake of length I will choose another blog to discuss more of the animations I watch. But after watching these I Understood how shorter forms of storytelling work not on structure and long journeys but rather capturing the essence of a feeling, a moment, an idea. with this in mind I continued expanding on my ideas and started my first animatic.

To be continued.

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

@sajdd

Ok since one singular person asked for this the Big Explanation for Everything In My C!Tommy Design.

General:

c!Tommy, in general, I always try and find a balance between my really soft style and c!Tommy's rougher personality. I draw him with soft features but very sharp eyes, both to make his facial features distinct from cc!Tommy and a contrast to c!Tubbo who I draw with less rounded features but much softer eyes. I try and keep his usual expressions slightly smug and self-assured, to get across c!Tommy's bravado.

I generally draw him with tanned skin, as I imagine he’d spend a lot of time outdoors. This does vary on the arc I’m drawing him in, though, for example he’s much less tan in Pogtopia because he has less access to natural light whereas he’s more tan in exile due to not having much shelter from the sun. This is also done to make the pale scar on his nose bridge more noticeable- it’s one of the two scars I draw Tommy as having from the beginning, as I feel it shows c!Tommy's scrappy, determined personality very well. The other scar is a long jagged vivisection scar which is there to show my labinnit headcanon lol.

While I draw c!Tommy with varying hairstyles and lengths, I always draw him with curly textured hair that’s a very pale blond. I also draw his hair as leaning to one side and partially covering his eye, similar to how I draw c!Wilbur's hair, to show their closeness. I also draw c!Tommy with similar wings to c!Wilbur and c!Philza- specifically, I draw them with the same starry night sky pattern I do with c!Philza, but a lot smaller and atrophied.

I really like putting lots of fun design elements in characters eyes because drawing eyes is fun and c!Tommy is no exception! I draw his eyes a very bright electric blue, and I use a small brush and very light varied colours to make them look like they’re filled with little stars. I also give him red pupils to match his main colour association in either the shape of a full or broken heart depending on the arc. I went with a heart design to show his hidden kindness and loyalty.

There’s also a lot of design elements that are admittedly there primarily because I enjoy drawing them, and less for any specific reason. The fangs do have the most reason, to help show c!Tommy's rougher personality, but I also just like drawing fangs lol. (I also draw him with braces in every arc, since I imagine he couldn’t get them removed in exile and he didn’t have the time to care afterwards). I also draw him with bioluminescent, starlike freckles and a strange blood colour which is also used to help texture the skin (well, slightly, it’s not super noticeable but it’s pink instead of red) which are both just things I like to draw.

Also, this is a small detail, but I always draw c!Tommy with a Church Prime necklace (unless I forget it which I do sometimes lol). It’s a good way of showing his faith through a quick look.

Fun fact, what’s probably most noticeable about my c!Tommy design is that as soon as Tommy made the joke about his character being made in a lab I picked it up and ran with it, specifically the idea of him potentially being a clone of c!Philza. I draw them with identical facial features and hair colour/texture, though a lot of the more supernatural features of c!Philza are toned down on him. That’s specifically because due to my hc that c!Philza is an angel and angels as ageless it’d be impossible to clone them exactly so c!Tommy has some random human/hybrid dna thrown in haphazardly (which also makes him a mess of instincts from pretty much every animal ever lol)

Disc War:

I really like the headcanon that c!Tommy was nine during the L'Manburg war entirely because its really funny to imagine c!Wilbur looking at this literal nine year old and being “yes, my right hand man, responsible enough to help manage a nation in my stead,” so c!Tommy is roughly 9ish around this time in my design.

During the early Disc War is probably the only time I actually draw c!Tommy as close to his actual Minecraft skin lmao. It helps show that, despite the fact I don’t hc him as human he is mostly just a normal kid. I don’t draw c!Tommy in the traditional red and white t-shirt entirely just because I want to make sure he’s not mistakable for Dave Strider though. I have him in a white button-up shirt, a red and white hoodie, cargo pants, and trainers.

During this arc, I draw c!Tommy's hair as fairly short and very similar to how I draw c!Wilbur, as this was back when he idolised his brother and I think drawing their hair so similar shows that well.

L'Manburg:

This covers the time from the beginning of the L'Manburg war up to c!Tommy's second exile to Pogtopia, so this design covers a period of years from when I hc c!Tommy was nine up until about thirteen.

During the war, c!Tommy wears his uniform without modification, except for of course wearing his Prime necklace, but afterwards he and the rest of the residents of L'Manburg (except c!Wilbur) slightly modified their uniforms to better fit their own tastes. Specifically, he wears his trainers instead of combat boots, loose trousers instead of shorts, and a slightly shorter and short-sleeved revolutionary jacket, for easier mobility.

During the war, his two canon deaths left him permanent injuries and scars. His death in the final control room, where he broke his leg during his desperate attempt to escape, left that leg permanently weakened (along with being badly scarred) and requiring a leg brace to help him stand and walk properly. The arrow through his skull during his duel with c!Dream left him with a large scar on his temple, covering his brows in crack-like scars which also leave him with frequent migraines.

During the L'Manburg arc, c!Tommy's hair in my design still looks like c!Wilburs as they were still close during this arc.

Pogtopia:

Since Pogtopia apparently lasted two years (which is probably from Cursed Timeline Lore but I love cursed lore it’s hilarious,) c!Tommy would be around 13 to 15 here.

In Pogtopia, I draw c!Tommy as wearing similar clothes to during the Disc War arc, however, I also add on a loose belt holding knives, to show c!Tommy's increased need for self defence along with his fondness for knives lol. I actually don’t do the bandanna design with c!Tommy and c!Tubbo a lot of people do mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work with c!Tommy's hoodie. They have an equivalent but it’s later on alas.

As c!Tommy and c!Wilbur get more distant, c!Tommy grows out his hair slightly, and wears it tied in the back in a short ponytail.

Exile:

Oh I have a lot of things to talk about here >:). As a quick note to my messed up timeline, c!Tommy would be 15 here.

During exile, c!Tommy wears the same clothes as he did in Pogtopia initially, though due to lack of care and supplies, they eventually of course fray and rip. He also wears c!Wilbur's old ragged longcoat, even though it barely keeps out the cold, the smell of alcohol and cigarettes weirdly comforting. Over time, he rips up his shirt for bandages to the point he’s not wearing anything under his hoodie. His leg brace breaks and he makes a new one out of branches and leaves. (He could ask c!Dream, but he doesn’t want to be fucking reliant on him, relying on pity handouts like a child, so he won’t.)

Eventually, since c!Dream doesn’t exactly want c!Tommy to get hypothermia and die anticlimactically, he gives c!Tommy one of his capes. This is one of my favourite character design decisions I’ve made lmao. I specifically draw it looking too-big, despite the fact that doesn’t make much sense because they’re the same height, so it looks almost like he’s getting enveloped in c!Dream's green shades, and it also hides c!Tommy's wings which helps reinforce the loss of freedom.

c!Tommy gains… a lot of scars over exile. I mean he was literally hit by an axe multiple times. Specifically they’re primarily around the shoulders or the torso. I also draw him with a Glasgow grin, specifically curved to resemble Dream's mask, along with smaller, self inflicted, scratch and bite marks covering his arms. In addition, due to him barely eating I draw c!Tommy from this point onwards looking very scrawny. This is also where c!Tommy's pupils change from hearts to broken hearts! They never turn back :)

During exile, Tommy's hair grows out a lot, down to just past his shoulders, in a matted mess. c!Dream used to braid it at the back, like how I draw c!Dream's own hair, but it very quickly grew too matted with saltwater, mud, and blood to style :) :) :)

Bedrock Bros:

c!Tommy turns sixteen here during my scuffed timeline.

c!Tommy patches up the rips and tears in his clothes. He can’t fully salvage his cargo trousers, so he turns them into shorts. He makes his own shoes out of leather to replace the ones he lost. There’s a gaping hole in his hoodie pocket that couldn’t be stitched up. He'll patch it up later. c!Techno gives him one of his capes to keep him warm, fur lined and arctic blue with silvery snowflakes embroidered on. c!Tommy has to be reminded, or he puts on the green cape, turned a dull viridian from the sun, that makes him feel both safe and so, so afraid.

Scars heal, but never fully fade. Still, his eyes brighten again, somewhat, even if the bags under his eyes less disappear and more just turn a strange gold. He finally has the time to clean out his hair, and c!Techno ties it into a short, loose braid at the back. With the cape, he almost looks like c!Techno like that. Obviously, the visual implication here is to show that even though it’s obviously not exile, c!Techno is still suppressing c!Tommy's identity, albeit unknowingly (and the gold is from his constant eating of golden apples).

Final Disc War:

By this point, c!Tommy's back to just wearing his old clothes, tattered and frail as they might be. He finds his old sneakers, and day by day he sees himself in the mirror a bit more than the gunpowder on a battered trenchcoat, blood on a smiley face mask, wither rot on the edges of an elaborate snowy cape. He patches the hole in his hoodie with a piece of the fabric from one of c!Tubbo's old shirts. He lends him one of his too-small hoodies so he can do the same.

He still braids his hair, but in his own way, in a tightly woven ratstail braid more for convenience than for aesthetics. Character design wise, it’s another way to show c!Tommy's openly rougher personality than say, c!Dream or c!Techno, and so’s the patchwork clothes and rough shorts and scars. Like I said, maintaining a mix of rough and soft is very important to me in how I draw c!Tommy, and I’m very satisfied with how I pull it off here and in the next entry.

Revival:

the story has handed me the opportunity to make my favourite boy undead. i will not pass up the opportunity to make my favourite boy undead.

After revival, c!Tommy stops aging, at least in appearance. His skin… less pale, more colourless and almost grey. One of his eyes glows a pure, empty white now, like ghosts do, and the white messy streak in his hair doesn’t glow but it’s white enough it might as well.

The injuries of his death bear apparent on his form. His limbs can bend at impossible angles, his entire body covered head to toe in bruises. Two black eyes cover his face like a raccoon mask, and the ugly mottled marks of strangulation on his throat stand out like a sore thumb. You cannot look at him anymore and not see that he hasn’t died. He avoids mirrors again.

There’s stranger things, too, like how he doesn’t bleed anymore, any cuts just revealing an impossibly dark void beneath his marble-cold skin. Sometimes he goes weeks without eating, the hunger only hitting once he realises. He feels so tired, so cold, in a way not even the touch of fire can stem at all. He doesn’t have a heartbeat, or breathe.

Initially, he was too tired, too out of it to even consider cutting off or dying the white streak. When he wasn’t, he’d soon learn any attempts were futile, dye fading in mere days, cut off hair half regrown in a week. It should bother him more, but he just feels numb.

[alwaysalreadyangry]

most of the UK reviews i’ve read of martin eden have been a disappointment, tbh. i don’t know if this is because critics have been busy with cannes or because outlets here just don’t have the space, or because it’s kind of seen as old news. i have seen no real engagement with the politics or form beyond a couple of cursory lines, and it’s a shame because... i think it’s really rich wrt those elements?

so i am looking again at the (wonderful) review from film comment last year and it’s such a shame that it’s not available freely online. so i thought i’d post it here behind a cut. it’s long but worth it imo (and also engages really interestingly with marcello’s other films). it’s by phoebe chen.

COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS              Jan  3, 2020                    BY PHOEBE CHEN

EARLY IN JACK LONDON’S 1909 NOVEL MARTIN EDEN, there is a scattering of references to technical ephemera that the 20th century will promptly leave behind: “chromos and lithographs,” those early attempts at large-scale reproduction; “a vast camera obscura,” by then a centuries-old relic; a bullfight so fervid it’s like “gazing into a kinetoscope,” that proto-cinematic spectacle of cloistered motion. These objects now seem like archaic curios, not much more than the flotsam of culture from the moment it shifted gears to mass production. It’s a change in scale that also ensnares the novel’s title character, a hardy young sailor and autodidact-turned-writer-célèbre, famously an avatar of London’s own hollowing transmutation into a figure for mass consumption. But, lucky him—he remains eminent now on the other side of a century; chance still leaves a world of names and faces to gather dust. Easily the most arresting aspect of Pietro Marcello’s new adaptation is its spotlight on the peripheral: from start to end, London’s linear Künstlerroman is intercut with a dizzying range of archival footage, from a decaying nitrate strip of anarchist Errico Malatesta at a workers’ rally to home video–style super 16mm of kids jiving by an arcade game. In these ghostly interludes, Marcello reanimates the visual detritus of industrial production as a kind of archival unconscious.

This temporal remixing is central to Marcello’s work, mostly experimental documentaries that skew auto-ethnographic and use elusive, essayistic editing to constellate place and memory, but always with a clear eye to the present. Marcello’s first feature, Crossing the Line (2007), gathers footage of domestic migrant workers and the nocturnal trains that barrel them to jobs across the country, laying down a recurring fascination with infrastructure. By his second feature, The Mouth of the Wolf (2009), there is already the sense of an artist in riveting negotiation with the scope of his story and setting. Commissioned by a Jesuit foundation during Marcello’s yearlong residency in the port city of Genoa, the film ebbs between a city-symphonic array and a singular focus on the story of a trans sex worker and her formerly incarcerated lover, still together after 20-odd years and spells of separation. Their lives are bound up with a poetic figuration of the city’s making, from the mythic horizon of ancient travails, recalled in bluer-than-blue shots of the Ligurian Sea at dawn, to new-millennium enterprise in the docklands, filled with shipping crates and bulldozers busy with destruction.

Marcello brings a similar approach to Martin Eden, though its emphasis is inverted: it’s the individual narrative that telescopes a broader history of 20th-century Italy. In this pivotal move, Marcello and co-writer Maurizio Braucci shift London’s Oakland-set story to Naples, switching the cold expanse of the North Pacific for the Mediterranean and its well-traversed waters. The young century, too, is switched out for an indeterminate period with jumbled signifiers: initial clues point to a time just shy of World War II, though a television set in a working-class household soon suggests the late ’50s, and then a plastic helicopter figurine loosely yokes us to the ’70s. Even the score delights in anachronism, marked by a heavy synth bass that perforates the sacral reverb of a cappella and organ song, like a discotheque in a cathedral. And—why not?—’70s and ’80s Europop throwbacks lend archival sequences a further sense of epochal collapse. While Marcello worked with researcher Alessia Petitto for the film’s analog trove, much of its vintage stock is feigned by hand-tinting and distressing original 16mm footage. Sometimes a medium-change jolts with sudden incongruity, as in a cut to dockworkers filmed in black and white, their faces and hands painted in uncanny approximations of living complexions. Other transitions are so precisely matched to color and texture that they seem extensions of a dream.

Martin’s writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.

Patchworked from the scraps of a long century, this composite view seems to bristle against a story of individual formation. It feels like a strange time for an artist’s coming-of-age tale adapted with such sincerity, especially when that central emphasis on becoming—and becoming a writer, no less—is upended by geopolitical and ecological hostility. At first, our young Martin strides on screen with all the endearing curiosity of an archetypal naïf, played by Luca Marinelli with a cannonballing force that still makes room for the gentler affects of embarrassment and first love. Like the novel, the film begins with a dockside rescue: early one morning, Martin saves a young aristocrat from a beating, for which he is rewarded with lunch at the family estate. On its storied grounds, Martin meets the stranger’s luminous sister, Elena Orsini (Jessica Cressy), a blonde-haloed and silk-bloused conduit for his twinned desires of knowledge and class transgression. In rooms of ornate stucco and gilded everything, the Orsinis parade their enthusiasm for education in a contrived show of open-mindedness, a familiar posture of well-meaning liberals who love to trumpet a certain model of education as global panacea. University-educated Elena can recite Baudelaire in French; Martin trips over simple conjugations in his mother tongue. “You need money to study,” he protests, after Elena prescribes him a back-to-school stint. “I’m sure that your family would not ignore such an important objective,” she insists (to an orphan, who first set sail at age 11).

Anyone who has ever been thrilled into critical pursuit by a single moment of understanding knows the first beat of this story. Bolting through book after book, Martin is fired by the ever-shifting measure of his knowledge. In these limitless stretches of facts to come, there’s the promised glow of sheer comprehension, the way it clarifies the world as it intoxicates: “All hidden things were laying their secrets bare. He was drunk with comprehension,” writes London. Marcello is just as attentive to how Martin understands, a process anchored to the past experiences of his working body. From his years of manual labor, he comes to knowledge in a distinctly embodied way, charming by being so literal. At lunch with the Orsinis, he offers a bread roll as a metaphor for education and gestures at the sauce on his plate as “poverty,” tearing off a piece of education and mopping up the remnants with relish. Later, in a letter to Elena, he recounts his adventures in literacy: “I note down new words, I turn them into my friends.” In these early moments, his expressions are as playful as they are trenchant, enlivened by newfound ways of articulating experience. His writer’s optimism is built on a faith in language as the site of communication and mutual recognition. So follows his tragedy.

One of Marcello’s major structural decisions admittedly makes for some final-act whiplash, when a cut elides the loaded years of Martin’s incremental success, stratospheric fame, and present fall into jaded torpor. By now, he is a bottle-blonde chain-smoker with his own palazzo and entourage, set to leave on a U.S. press tour even though he hasn’t written a thing in years. His ideas have been amplified to unprecedented reach by mass media, and his words circulate as abstract commodities for a vulturine audience. For all its emphasis on formation, Martin Eden is less a story of ebullient self-discovery than one of inhibiting self-consciousness. There is no real sense that Martin’s baseline character has changed, because it hasn’t. Even his now best-selling writing is the stuff of countless prior rejected manuscripts. From that first day at the Orsini estate, when his roughness sticks out to him as a fact, he learns about the gulf between a hardier self-image and the surface self that’s eyed by others.

WITH SUCH A DEEPLY INHABITED PERFORMANCE by Marinelli, it’s intuitive to read the film as a character study, but the lyrical interiority of London’s novel never feels like the point of Marcello’s adaptation. Archival clips—aged by time, or a colorist’s hand—often seem to illustrate episodes from Martin’s past, punctuating the visual specificity of individual memory: a tense encounter with his sister cuts to two children dancing with joyous frenzy; his failed grammar-school entrance exam finds its way to sepia-stained shots of a crippled, shoeless boy. These insertions are more affective echoes than literal ones, the store of a single life drawn from a pool of collective happening.

But, that catch: writing in the hopes of being read, as Martin does (as most do), means feeding some construct of a distinctive self. While the spotlight of celebrity singles out the destructive irony of Martin’s aggressive individualism, Marcello draws from Italy’s roiling history of anarchist and workerist movements to complicate the film’s political critique, taking an itinerant path through factions and waves from anarcho-communism in the early 1900s to the pro-strike years of autonomist Marxism in the late ’70s. In place of crystalline messaging is a structure that parallels Martin’s own desultory politics, traced in both film and novel through his commitment to liberal theorist Herbert Spencer. Early on, Martin has an epiphanic encounter with Spencer’s First Principles (a detail informed by London’s own discovery of the text as a teen), which lays out a systematic philosophy of natural laws, and offers evolution as a structuring principle for the universe—a “master-key,” London offers. Soon, Martin bellows diatribes shaped by Spencer’s more divisive, social Darwinist ideas of evolutionary justice, as though progress is only possible through cruel ambivalence. Late in the film, an image of a drunk and passed-out Martin cuts to yellowed footage of a young boy penciling his name—“Martin Eden”—over and over in an exercise book, a dream of becoming turned memory.

In Marcello’s previous feature, Lost and Beautiful (2015), memory is more explicitly staged as an attachment to landscape. Like Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro, Lost and Beautiful plays as a pastoral elegy but lays out the bureaucratic inefficiency that hastens heritage loss through neglect. Rolling fields make occasional appearances in Martin Eden, but its Neapolitan surroundings evoke a different history. Far from the two oceans that inspired a North American tradition of maritime literature, the Mediterranean guards its own idiosyncrasies of promise and catastrophe. Of the Sea’s fraught function as a regional crossroads, Marcello has noted, in The Mouth of the Wolf, a braiding of fate and agency: “They are men who transmigrate,” the opening voiceover intones. “We don’t know their stories. We know they chose, found this place, not others.” Mare Nostrum—“Our Sea”—is the Roman epithet for the Mediterranean, a possessive projection that abides in current vernacular. Like so many cities that cup the sea, Naples is a site of immigrant crossing, a fact slyly addressed in Martin Eden with a fleeting long shot of black workers barreling hay in a field of slanted sun, and, at the end, a group of immigrants sitting on a beach at dusk. Brief, but enough to mark the changing conditions of a new century.

Not much is really new, however: not the perils of migration, nor the proselytizing individualists, nor the media circus, nor the classist distortions of taste, nor, blessedly, the kind of learning for learning’s sake that stokes and sustains an interest in the world. Toward the end of the film, there is a shot of our tired once-hero, slumped in the back seat of a car, that cuts to sepia stock of children laughing and running to reach the camera-as-car-window, as if peering through glass and time. It recalls a scene from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, which leaps backward through a similar gaze, when the weary angel Cassiel looks out of a car window at the vista of ’80s Berlin and sees, instead, grainy footage of postwar streets strewn with rubble in fresh ruin. Where human perception is shackled to linearity, these wool-coated and scarfed seraphs—a materialization of Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”—see all of time in a simultaneous sweep, as they wander Berlin with their palliative touch. Marcello’s Martin Eden mosaics a view less pointedly omniscient, but just as filled with a humanist commitment to the turning world, even as Martin slides into disillusion. All its faces plucked from history remind me of a line from a Pasolini poem: “Everything on that street / was human, and the people all clung / to it tightly.”

Phoebe Chen is a writer and graduate student living in New York.

[justsomefluff]

Hello I was wondering if you could do an ateez reaction to going to a fashion show with their girlfriend 🥺❤

here it is!! sorry it’s so late!! I hope you enjoy! <3

Hongjoong:

Okay so Joong is the type to pretend he doesn’t want to go

But then love every second of it

And after your first one, he’s gonna beg you to go to more shows with him

Like every time a model comes out wearing something new, even if the entire look is hideous, he’s gonna complement something about the look

Because he knows how hard the models and designers work to make all this happen

And if there’s a look he really really loves, he’ll look at you and be like

Im gonna buy that for you

Suddenly showering you in complements

“Babe, you’d look so beautiful in that”

“Babe, you’re the most stunning person in here”

NO FAX, JUST PRINTER

And at the end of the night, you’ve both compiled a list of colors and styles you would like to see on each other

So you decide to make each other outfits for the next date you go on

And its just so cute bc Joongie really does draw inspiration from everything he sees

So he totally writes a song about this experience with you

Seonghwa:

Seonghwa is not shy about his love for fashion

Like he has his own sense of style, and he loves choosing things that he feels will express his personality

So when you guys get the chance to go to a fashion show together

OH BOY GET READY

He’s gonna grade every look under his breath on a scale from 1-10

And then he’ll tell you what he likes most about each style that is presented

He tries not to be too critical though bc he knows that everyone’s tastes are different

Will also ask your opinion on the outfits

Like “ooh what do you think of that one? I really like the textures on it!”

You will both choose your top two outfits 

like you choose them so that you have one you want just for yourself and one that you want for him

And then he does the same

You typically choose similar looks because you know each other’s style super well

And Hwa is totally the type to surprise you by buying you one of the pieces he had seen you eyeing more than the others

“Just as a thank you for coming with me :)”

Yunho:

His crackhead comes out in full force at fashion shows, believe me

I mean seriously

Every time something comes out that he doesn’t like he insults it in a really funny way

And you’re sitting in the front row so your literally biting your lip so hard to not laugh in front of all these cameras

Like a model comes out with a bunch of feathers on her outfit and Yunho’s just like 

“Heads up, everybody, Chicken Little has just hit the stage!”

Or if he sees something particularly revealing he’s like

“Wouldn’t you love to see me in that, baby”

Like would you just hush already lmao

He takes a picture of every single look that he finds funny, just so he can send them to you later with a funny caption

But he also sees one he really loves

Will take a picture of your side profile when you aren’t looking

And the model is coming down the runway in the background

He will save that picture as his background as a reminder that he is going to get you that outfit someday

But he will try not to let you find out that he was so soft about it lmao

So he tries to keep you from seeing his wallpaper

He really wants it to be a surprise, but he also cant stop looking at the picture and imagining the moment you are finally able to put the outfit on

Yeosang:

(he’s so cute I cant breatheeee)

Yeosang will sit pretty silently through most of it

But do not be fooled

NO MODEL IS SAFE

He is judging and critiquing every single look like it is his JOB

The most stone cold poker face you will ever see

Will only crack a smile if you whisper “you’d look so good in that, Sangie”

But when you finally leave he will show you any of the pictures he had taken and start a legitimate conversation about how you liked or disliked each look

Has a grading system lmao

Like you have A-F grading scale, but also categories that each look has to fulfill

Color, texture, fit, overall flow of the patterns and clothing items, etc.

And you can play along for a while before you’re finally like 

“YEOSANG, WE ARENT JUDGES ON NEXT TOP MODEL”

“We could be”

Like boy if you don’t-

But then he gives in and he’s like “just tell me which one you loved the most and I’ll tell you if it was good or not”

So you do and he’s like “THAT WAS THE WORST LOOK OF THE ENTIRE NIGHT WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT”

And then that launches a playful debate about who has better fashion sense

But overall you both had a really good time and plan on making this an annual tradition

San:

(he’s so breathtaking here im sorry I mean cmon his hair matches his sweatshirt)

This fashionista here

Sees the artistry in every look and compliments literally everything

Very genuine in his appreciation for the work that has been done

Spewing compliments the entire time

“Omg look how intricate all the stitching is.”

“That fascinator is so stunning, look at all the colors wow”

And it’s so cute to just watch him

Like he’s assessing all the models with the biggest doe eyes

He really is like a little kid at Disneyland for the first time

Just so excited and appreciative of every little thing

“I wish our next comeback could be so beautiful like this!”

“Sannie, your comebacks are always beautiful”

“BUT LOOK AT ALL THIS ELEGANCE!!”

It’s just so adorable

And when the designer comes out at the end of each parade of models, you can bet San is cheering the loudest

And he’ll be so inspired and as his makeup noonas to try and replicate some of the looks he had seen

Gets hella motivated and literally starts drawing up ideas that he has for costumes and things

He’s just a sweet baby who sees the beauty in everything and wants to make beautiful things too

And he will always ask your opinion on his drawings

“Do you like this one? Do you think it could work?”

And of course you tell him all of them are fantastic bc they are

And you guys work together to make some of his outfit dreams come true

Mingi:

At fashion shows, Mingi thrives bc models tend to be really tall for some reason

As a short person, I am offended by tall people’s clothes

ANYWAY

Mingi is just looking at the pants like “I bet those would actually fit me on the first try”

And then he’s like “baby, I could be a model”

And you’re like “I already knew that, you’ve always been pretty”

He gets blushy aww

“I’m pretty” UWUUUUUU

And now that you’ve got him going you cant just let that blush fade away I mean its too cute

Don’t squander this opportunity to make our baby blush even harder

So literally every other model your whispering “you’d look better in that”

“You’d be the best model here, Minnie”

And eventually he’s smiling so big and blushing so hard that he’s like “stoop my cheeks hurt”

So you settle for giving him a lil smoochie on his cheek

But then he shall take his revenge

Starts complementing you even more than you had complemented him

Thus begins a complement war

By the end, both of you realize that you’ve ignored the last two sets of models and had just been telling each other how much you love each other over and over

Get a room you guys I mean really

Wooyoung:

Wooyoung is a giggly mess

The entire time

Because he thinks every little thing is funny

A model’s makeup is too extreme? He’s laughing

Someone’s hair is too wild? He’s laughing

Someone looks like they rolled straight out of a dumpster? he’s laughing and saying “thats you”

Like SHUT UP lmaoooo

He’s also laughing bc he’s imagining the members in all of the ugly outfits

Like “lmao imagine Hongjoong wearing that big ole hat”

“Imagine Seonghwa wearing those balloon shorts”

Like he’s so annoying lmao

But it does have you both laughing hard enough to get dirty looks from other spectators

Once he eventually calms down and hushes himself, he actually starts getting into it and thoroughly enjoys watching the way the clothes flow when the models walk and stuff

He finds it genuinely interesting to see how each artist has fit the clothes to each specific model’s body type

But he will still fit in some snide comments here and there to make sure you’re fully entertained

Bc if he’s not laughing… is it really Wooyoung

Jongho:

Okay Jongho is definitely into fashion

Whether he is obvious about his affinity for cool clothes or not, he’s into it okay

And he evaluates every look in terms of “would I look good in that? Would bae look good in that? Would any of the hyungs look good in that?”

Very thoughtful baby

Will take pictures to send to people and be like “this reminds me of you”

Will say it directly to you too

He is also kinda cheesy and poetic about it

“The bright pink reminds me of how happy you make me”

“That blue is like the sky when you’re around: cloudless”

Eventually you’re like “oh shut up ya freak” lmao

And then he’s laughing bc he’s embarrassed that he said all that

He’s like “why am I so cheesy”

And you low-key love it so you just smile at him

But then he keeps taking pictures of the models and eventually starts taking pictures of you bc he just loves you and finds you so breathtaking awww

At the end of the night he’s so sweet to you and thanks you for coming with him and hopes you had a good time and-

You just kiss him and tell him you had a lot of fun and you should definitely do it again next time there’s a show in town

He definitely agrees bc he really just loved sharing that experience with you

[escentia]

On using the iPad for art

Last year I bought an iPad Pro (12.9", 2nd Gen) from a local second-hand shop after doing lots of research. The drawing experience on the iPad turned out to be quite different from how I imagined it to be, in both good ways and bad.

I've come to realise that artists can have wildly different opinions on a piece of drawing equipment due to their different drawing styles and habits. Youtube reviewers with simple, cartoon drawing styles are more easily satisfied with a drawing tool than people with more nuanced styles

I'm going share my two cents on the iPad, hopefully it helps artists with a similar drawing style to mine.

---

My main use of my iPad right now is making quick sketches, studies, and laying down rough lineart for my comic. The notebook-like form factor of the iPad makes it an approachable art tool. I love dashing out quick sketches on the iPad, espeically with Procreate.

However, the iPad isn't an ideal tool for drawing detailed lineart. The Apple Pencil has a blunt crayon-like tip that's a far cry from the precision of mechanical pencils or technical pens. When I'm drawing thin lines I find it difficult to land them on the exact position I want them to be.

The blunt tip of the Apple Pencil has another drawback: it forces "paper-like" screen protector to be rough and toothy in order to replicate the feeling of pencil and paper. The smaller the stylus nib, the finer the surface texture it can work with. On the iPad you have to choose between a very rough screen potector that creates colour noise on the display, or drawing on a slick surface with little control over your lines. From what I gather, Cintiqs manage to replicate the paperlike feel with a smoother surface (and less colour noise) due to the smaller nibs of their styli.

After trying 4 different screen protectors I've finally settled on Elecom's paperlike screen protector. While it does lower the display quality of the iPad, its texture is satisfying to work with. ---- The main gripe I have with the iPad is how it performs with very light pressure on CSP. When I try doing light shading and crosshatching, it often gives me a blob at the start of each line. I've tried fiddling around with my brush settings to circumvent this problem to no avail.

The blob problem doesn't exist on Procreate. However, Procreate's brush engine feels stiff and plasticky compared to CSP's. It's very hard to quantify the difference exactly, but I do feel much more comfortable drawing with CSP!

In contrast, my Intuos (2018), which cost a quarter of the iPad, handles light strokes smoothly with absolutely no issues.

--- Even though the iPad has its fair share of imperfections, I don't think it's a bad drawing device at all. It still has a gorgeous display and absolutely no parallax. Those who work with thicker lines and heavier pressure will find a joy to work with. I would however hesitate to recommend it for CSP users who draw with very light strokes. If I had to choose between an iPad and Cintiq I would still go with the iPad, simply because it's eliminated the need for paper from my life. I use it for reading textbooks, taking notes during lectures, displaying sheet music and occassionally watching Youtube.

If you're looking for a dedicated drawing device, Wacom is the way to go (I can't recommend Huion and Xp-pen products yet, for reasons I'll explain in another post). But if you're looking for an all-purpose digital notebook, you can't go wrong with the iPad.

[theindiegamereview]

Meet the creative team: “Spellstone”

Are you a collectible card game (CCG) fan? If so, read on, because this week we spoke to the makers of Spellstone, a free-to-play (F2P) casual story-based fantasy card game that features vibrant, colourful, hand-drawn art on hundreds of beautiful cards that you can acquire and use in battle, both against the computer and other players!

TIGR: PABLO and DUSTIN are artists who have worked on Spellstone's art, helping create some of the iconic characters Spellstone fans know and love. We asked them how they came to work on the game, as well as what intrigued them about this project.

DUSTIN: I was working as a contract artist when I was asked to create some sample cards for a potential CCG, which is something I'd always wanted to do. The samples I submitted eventually led to me getting a contract to create the initial art for Spellstone. After about four months, I was offered a full-time position. I had such a great experience working with the team that I jumped at the opportunity!

PABLO: Prior to starting work on Spellstone, I remember doing an art piece to test my skills. I greatly enjoyed that because I particularly liked this game's art style - which is actually similar to my own! There were still slight differences though, so I've had to adapt a little. Blending my own personal style into an existing one was challenging. But something that intrigued me about Spellstone was the variety of factions in the game. Each and every one opens up a big array of possibilities when it comes to creating a character. I felt my options were unlimited and I loved it!

TIGR: Spellstone features many different cards and characters. We wanted to know who conceptualises all this, and how much creative licence artists get when crafting a character. FERNANDO, currently the main artist for the game, gave us more insight.

FERNANDO:  That Spellstone has such an immense variety of characters means it's a complete and delightful dish for artists. It's hugely gratifying to find such visual diversity with which to play with. You're completely free to create, as long as you respect the game's universe and visual language.

As for the process, the concept of what a card must look like and how it must be functional in terms of gameplay comes from the guys in the game design department. Very creative people... sorcerers maybe? I don't know. Haha!

From a brief but concise description they give me, I can get a sense of what kind of character and action they want to see in a card. Once I have all the information I need to start sketching, my favourite hour finally begins: creative hour!

If the card description involves an existing type of character, like a goblin, part of the fun has to do with the way you depict that character, situation, action and specific emotion. There's also some freedom to create from scratch if needed - that's exciting and challenging! Sometimes the ideas come from a mix of characters, and that's when the laboratory inside my mind starts working: I press a button and something cool, spooky or funny comes out - whatever the game requires. Other times, new concepts require that I look for approximate references of what's needed, so that serves as the starting point. No matter what, it's always a very enjoyable process. Sometimes we have to make corrections, that's true. But as with everything in life, this is necessary for things to work properly. You may have to redraw stuff, but finally the card is done - it works, it delivers and it entertains!

  TIGR: In Spellstone, cards can be upgraded from a single to a dual to a quad, and we really like that this sometimes tells a "mini story" of of sorts through the artwork. Some are funny (we just love Honeycomb Lobber!), some cute (Bomb Spirit is soooo adorable when he’s angry!), some uplifting (Aurora Shaver ranks among our favourites), and some, um, a bit disturbing, to be honest (Cleaverstorm Hunter, anyone?!)! And some are just sad - we can't help but feel sorry for the poor li'l forest furries that presumably got devoured by Alphamech Stalker! We asked the team how they came up with ideas for all these tiny narratives, and MELINDA, one of the game designers, told us more.

MELINDA: When I was younger, there were a few creatures in video games that terrified me. One of those I remembered most was Medusa, an air jellyfish from Ecco: The Tides of Time. While traversing through a water pathway in the sky, Medusa would try to pick up Ecco the dolphin and fling him off the path. Tetraspout's concept came from that, and you can even see poor little dolphins getting swept up in its attack!

  TIGR: We asked the team if there were any cards they particularly liked creating, or found challenging to conceptualise. IVÁN, a colorist who worked briefly on the game, chipped in, as did TONY and RHADA, two of Spellstone's game designers.

DUSTIN: I loved working on the goblin cards! You could get silly with them. Frogs were a lot of fun too - the variety of colours made them interesting. For me, the water cards were challenging but I grew to love working on them.

PABLO: My favourite characters are Goblins! You can play around with them, making them look funny even when the card is telling a dark story, like a massacre. All of the cards were challenging to create!

IVÁN: I enjoyed working on Hedron The Critical Threat, Zyd The Unhinged, and some awesome Insect cards that have yet to be released (as of the time of this interview). I mostly liked them because of their cool concepts and Fernando's awesome sketches. Hedron in particular was a technical painting challenge, as it has textures, transparencies and glow!

TONY: As something of an artist myself (/sarcasm), the card I am most proud of has to be Dinged Waptor. Or really any of the cards I did for the April Fool's event, which is about the only time the art team lets me anywhere near card art. :) For April Fool's, I decided it would be funny to try my hand at drawing some cards I felt players would enjoy. So the first year I drew some original characters that consisted of a few stick figures, a chicken, and a bomb. The response was good, so the following year I continued the tradition, eventually going through and tracing some famous cards like Winged Raptor. My one rule while making these cards was that I could not erase what I did!

RHADA: We used to sell boxes that contained two new premium cards instead of one. We thought of making both cards in the box thematically linked. At the same time, while brainstorming concepts for dragons, I thought we could try to make cards that formed a bigger picture on the battlefield when placed consecutively, side by side. The initial idea was a serpent whose artwork overflowed into a second card, and after some iteration, we stumbled upon the idea of a dragon dance. The result was very cool!

TIGR: With the Spellstone story campaign recently concluded, we asked what was next in store for Spellstone fans. Would there be anymore new characters and amazing art to look forward to?

TONY: Absolutely! While the main story has come to a close, we still look forward to adding new characters, cards, and art to the game that lets our artists have fun and shows off the world of Spellstone.

TIGR: And finally, the most important question of all: would real-life Spellstone merchandise ever be made available for fans of the game? We really want a plushie of the adorable Bomb Spirit (complete with detachable bombs, perhaps?), as well as his angry counterpart, Firebomb Spirit! Also for Quetee Que and Adorabilis, please! And would there ever be any actual physical Spellstone cards produced for collectors?

TONY: I would personally love to see real-life merchandise, but we currently do not have the means to take on such an endeavour. Maybe one day we can strike a partnership with a team that can make this happen!

We thank the Spellstone team for their time and all the wonderful art assets that accompany this interview! Check out the game here on Kongregate, on Steam, or on mobile - three different ways you can enjoy this fun, cheeky and adorable CCG!

P.S. We just had to include our favourite card: Darkwater Adonis - don’t be fooled by his charms!

[endlessdoom]

Endless Random /idgames WAD Adventures #005

bildoom1.zip

THT: Threnody (oh shit)

Heroes 2 (oh fuck)

Hells Half Acre

Demon's Revenge

Dreams

FATE01.WAD "Fate Series"

bildoom1.zip

Uploaded to the archives in 2011, but with real date being 1995. This WAD with 3 maps is probably one of the reasons why so many tenge are afraid to explore the /idgames archives randomly. It is clearly a rather novice WAD from 1995 that has all the kind of bugs and factors that we would find during that decade. Admittedly, 1995 was not a very bright year for WADs, but what can we expect? They were barely a year old with real editors. One way or another, this collection of 3 maps is one that has a certain childish charisma that I can't help but laugh at. It's crap, sure, but even in the crap there's a certain charisma.

The first map is probably the most understandable of them all. It looks pretty ugly and plays pretty ugly. The use of only one type of texture on extremely high walls is quite common, as well as a strange use of linedefs that seems to mimic a kindergarten crayon drawing. On the other hand, the path is understandable enough and the secrets connect well enough to at least deliver some playability.

The second map is a simple combat arena with Mancubus and a few extra enemies. From an objective point of view, it's the best map in terms of quality for the simple fact that it doesn't ask for much and does what it needs to do. And yet it is mediocre.

The third map is probably the most interesting in terms of design, but a headache in terms of path-finding. What we have here is a layout that starts with a hub system that hides a multitude of secret paths in total darkness. We have to search through each of the paths until we find all the keys to escape this nightmare in a final fight. While the beginning gives a certain sense of adventure, it quickly becomes a miserable dungeon crawler with unfair combat and lots and lots of darkness. I don't want to imagine how this looked in the original DOOM.EXE. In conclusion, it's very bad, but I've seen worse.

THT: Threnody

A collection of 20 maps makes this a respectfully large megawad that works in the style of Community Project, with the difference that the authors have managed to work under a fairly cohesive factor that gives a certain palpable identity to THT. Speaking of THT, this is also a WAD in the form of a tribute to one of the legends of the community, one of our greatest pillars and fantastic creator. THT stands for Ty Halderman Tribute, creator of the iconic TNT mappers group and also the maintainer of /idgames archive from 1997 to 2015. That's an amount of effort that very, very few of us in the community will ever manage to encompass. That's a lifetime of providing us with both content and pure hard work. This WAD is a dedication to Ty, a love letter of sorts that without needing to be an exact replica of his past works, has certain monuments to his legacy. A WAD that contains a particularly special essence, let's see what it is all about, shall we? 

While the megawad is designed in the form of a tribute, it does not attempt to replicate Ty's style exactly, nor copy directly from his creations; on the contrary, it chooses a system of references so subtle that they function like little poems whispered in silence. As we move forward, we will see things that remind us of his great contributions, while at the same time we play with the vague notion that we were already in this place once. A kind of dream that we never dreamed, and in that this megawad manages to carry that fantastic tribute idea.

I may have felt quite frustrated at times thanks to the constant hordes of enemies and the pseudo-slaughter gameplay at times, but every stage made it worthwhile. On the other hand, I'm capable of putting up with punishing combat, but confusing layouts? That really kills my patience, but I understand that sometimes the glory and fun lies in this singular aspect, the exploration and the feeling of being lost. On the other hand, don't let my words sound so extreme, this isn't Eternal Doom either, but you will need to pay attention and take note of where you've been and where you're going. If you like that, then you will love it. But even if you don't, let me tell you that I had a great time and thoroughly enjoyed the megawad. It's a long, but satisfying adventure that ends on a nostalgic note through space and time, like a dimensional goodbye from mirrors we don't see. A fine tribute that I'm sure Ty would love.

Heroes 2

An interesting megawad that works similar to what we would find in the ''shovelware'' discs of the 90s, that is, a compilation of random items united under the desire of commercialization. On the other hand, Heroes 2 doesn't have more than 3000 levels and won't make us regret our existence... that much. It is a compilation of 32 maps for Doom 2 compiled during 1996. What we will find here are maps so 90s that we will breathe both nostalgia and frustration. All the tropes that are common during these times lie in this megawad in such a way that it becomes like a kind of relic museum. It's perfect if you love this kind of WADs, but on the other hand, it's a great punishment if you prefer the life changes of modern times.

Hells Half Acre

From 1996, there is not much to expect in this WAD. It is a map that replaces E2M1 and contains some questionable design decisions. It starts with a simple room that then expands to reveal a pool connected to a multitude of paths. These paths are a marvel. As lost as they are cramped, it feels like I'm playing Daggarfall or a dungeon simulator. Possibly that was the author's intention. There is nothing special about this WAD that seems to set no higher expectations. While the design isn't truly terrible, it isn't great either and falls perfectly in the realm of mediocre in all its features. From the bland gameplay to the extremely confusing path system, the progression is just too boring. You don't miss anything by skipping this map, so it's an experience I'd totally recommend ignoring.

Demon's Revenge

A solid level designed with a theme reminiscent of Thy Flesh Consumend. Quite small but with enough detail and good touch to give it a charismatic essence that successfully unfolds in an enjoyable average time. With a relatively challenging gameplay, the level features an excellent balance between visuals and combat, offering a solid effort that is worth playing, even if it doesn't stand out for much else. Small errors here and there in decision making can be found, but overall, there's nothing major that truly destroys the map. As I said, solid all around. The only strange thing is that it doesn't have any MIDI songs, which makes it feel slightly awkward, but still fun.

Dreams

Simple, concrete and without much appearance. This is a 1996/7 level that doesn't try to be pretentious and delivers what it sets out to. A short level with a dungeon design that combines the classic textures of a hellish fortress with a few tints of absolute darkness. Nothing special but nothing terribly bad. Decent, honestly.

FATE01.WAD "Fate Series"

It looks like this is a 90s marathon this week. A simple, straightforward WAD replaces a single map and offers a system based on three connected rooms on a ''find the key'' basis. Combat is explosive, intense but simple without much tactical tact or any sort of deep mechanics within it. It's not too bad, but I would honestly classify it as mediocre. Nothing special or worthwhile.

[strangledeggs]

Strange Nostalgia For The Future – or: Death By A Thousand Taylor Swifts – or: This Is Pop?

Holy shit, when did this article get to be over 8 pages? Sorry everyone, Tumblr isn’t letting me do a cut, so this is just going to clog your feed for a while.

This began as a long-form review of Dua Lipa’s album “Future Nostalgia” with comparisons to the styles of a variety of other pop artists, but has since turned into something much broader and more nebulous. Call it my (incredibly subjective) attempt at defining a current “state of pop music” as it stands in the year 2020.

I’ll admit, I have a bias here, so I’ll lay that on the table: I didn’t particularly care for Dua Lipa prior to the release of “Future Nostalgia”. Actually, if I’m being completely honest, she didn’t really register on my radar until the album’s release, and so I didn’t hear any of her earlier songs until I spent a few minutes on Youtube scrambling to remember who she was and why this release was supposed to be such a big deal. I came up relatively empty-handed, with “New Rules” having more interesting production than anything in the way of a vocal hook and “Be The One” sounding blandly forgettable.

But music journalists were spinning this narrative that “Future Nostalgia” was Dua Lipa’s big moment, her “disco” album, her album full of “bangers” (yes, I know, that’s an archaism at this point, but what am I going to do, call them “vibes”?). We’ve seen hype like this before (at least I have), so we should always take some time when an album arrives with this much fanfare to ask that crucial question: is it justified? Does it live up to expectations?

I’m going to answer that question, but before I do, I want to take a step back and place that music journalism narrative within a broader music journalism meta-narrative that has been slowly gaining traction over the last decade. About 7 years ago (so around 2013), I wrote a guest article for the (what I assume is now defunct) blog Hitsville UK on another meta-narrative called “rockism”, by which older listeners and journalists tended to use to justify their dismissal modern pop music through the glorification of (and comparison to) the canon of rock music. This was not a unique article – many music journalists were writing about this same phenomenon that year; it will likely mark some sort of watershed moment in music journalism. Frequently contrasted with the meta-narrative of “rockism” (not so much in my own article, but definitely in others’) was a countering meta-narrative named as “poptimism”. It’s basically what it sounds like: an optimism that current pop music could be just as good as music of the past, or even better. This was, of course, already known in a lot of mainstream music journalism circles, but it did cause a bit of a stir in independent music journalism, especially since it seemed awfully hard to deny; then-recent examples of indie stars like The Weeknd and Frank Ocean* aspiring to make genuinely great pop music seemed like they were making a pretty good case for the poptimist outlook. Plus, as a new generation of music journalists raised on hip-hop began to cover the genre more seriously, it soon became clear that, given the crossover-laden history of rap, they would have to take pop music seriously too.

Needless to say, poptimism gained a lot of traction as a new paradigm, until it became the default outlook of music journalism by the middle of the decade. It has, as far as I can see, yet to relinquish its grip, and that’s not such a bad thing; arguably, a lot more women, queer people and people of colour have had their music taken more seriously since the shift. Before we get back to “Future Nostalgia”, however, there’s one more piece of this puzzle I want to put in place: coinciding with those early years of poptimism, pop itself hit a bit of a turning point in the year 2014. This was, of course, the release of Taylor Swift’s album “1989”.

What was so special about “1989”? It’s still a bit hard to answer that completely coherently, but it clearly changed the pop music landscape in meaningful ways. For one, it demonstrated that the overcoding of global pop music made at the hands of big-name producers was not just an approach reserved for the “born pop star” figures of Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera. Taylor Swift, formerly a country singer with pop leanings, now went headlong into Max Martin-penned chart-topping smashes, and just like that, she had become deterritorialized. It was a huge success, and, interestingly, one of the first albums that got a lot of independent music journalists (and me) to take her seriously despite being her most overtly commercially-driven. I think this speaks to the power of poptimism in 2014 from two angles: for the journalists, the lesson seemed to be that if someone is already doing something near-enough to mainstream pop and then breaks through with a mass-appeal hit, why not see this as a kind of fulfillment of artistic intent? And for Swift, if you’re already doing something near-enough to what’s playing on pop radio, why not go all the way with it and sacrifice your country “credibility” for the ability to have hits beyond the genre-specific? “1989” marked a turning point at which pop music, formerly seen as something people “sell out” to make, became something you “sell into”, erasing a specific, localized identity that could be exposed as a construction anyway and replacing it with the ambition to conquer the ears of the masses.

I should clarify here, however: there are two possible conclusions one can draw from poptimism. The one I just documented, that pop music as a global/commercial phenomenon can be great and should taken seriously by music journalism, is the more frequently-taken interpretation, but it’s not my preferred one. I would rather the alternative view, which is that most music that people have tended to hear the last several decades, whether marked by the seal of “pop” or not, has been pop music. Rock is a form of pop. So is country, so is hip-hop, so is jazz, folk, metal, etc. We can distinguish between, say, the commercial radio pop – which I’ll from this point on designate as “Pop” with a capital “P” – and the pop tradition, but everything descends from pop tradition in the end, and Pop is just one more subgenre among many, albeit by definition the most popular at its given moment. Seeing that this is pretty indisputably true (and if you don’t believe me, you a) haven’t been reading my blog for long enough and b) have some serious research to do), we might as well take Pop as seriously as any other form of pop and subject it to the same criticisms, while simultaneously adjusting our criticisms of other pop subgenres in relation to our new appreciation of Pop. Who created the texture of this Pop song? Does this metal song have a hook? Is the phrasing in this hip-hop song conducive to its overall rhythmic feel? And so on, and so on.

I prefer this approach because it doesn’t necessarily assume a supremacy of one genre so much as level the playing field to allow for a more robust and less prejudiced criticism. It also doesn’t let listeners off the hook, as many (non-critics/journalists, most likely), given the opportunity raised by the previously-detailed interpretation of poptimism, would lazily slip back into listening to Top 40 radio without attempting to seek things beyond the charts; this alternative interpretation challenges us to try and hear the similarities between Led Zeppelin, Rihanna, Young Thug and The Clash while recognizing what each do uniquely. Unfortunately, it seems like the former interpretation has won out, at least for most audiences, and we now have a listener-base that, instead of keeping their ears peeled for next-big-thing indie groups like Arcade Fire as they might have circa 2008-2012, is content to wait for an already-famous star to drop the next “1989” crossover smash**.

This brings us back to “Future Nostalgia”, the latest in a line of Pop albums that seem primed to vy for that coveted position. There is, however, a bit of a gulf between “1989” and “Future Nostalgia”, and it’s not just because the moment of “1989” and poptimism has already happened. It’s also not because Dua Lipa isn’t “crossing over” from any outsider genre like Swift did with her move away from country – if anything, Dua Lipa is doubling down on her Pop ambitions here by putting them up-front and trying to make this album as blockbuster-signalling as possible. The biggest gulf is the musical one: compared to “1989” (and, I should add, a slew of other blockbuster Pop albums from the last decade, which I’ll get to discussing soon enough), “Future Nostalgia”’s songs are oddly lackluster.

Let’s start with the good, though. On my first listen to the album, I wasn’t completely baffled that critics were hearing something momentous in it. There are absolutely (again, sorry) bangers on this. Ironically, the two that stood out to me immediately were two that I later learned weren’t even released as singles, which might speak to the marketing team’s inability to judge the quality of the music they were handling here. “Cool”, easily the best thing on “Future Nostalgia”, rides a sort of bouncy warping of the riff from Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” as Dua Lipa gushes about how she just can’t control herself in front of her lover; it’s sweet, both lyrically and musically. “Love Again” (no relation to the Run The Jewels song) is perhaps the album’s most explicitly “disco” song with swelling strings and everything, and expresses a similar sentiment to “Cool”, though perhaps from a more reluctant angle: “God damn,” Dua Lipa sighs in the chorus, sounding simultaneously annoyed and amused, “you got me in love again”.

The songwriting on “Cool” and “Love Again” also happens to be some of the most basic on “Future Nostalgia”; the beat loops, albeit with some nice flourishes and rhythmic quirks, and Dua Lipa cycles through a few simple melodies, the catchiest always winding up in the chorus. “Love Again” is practically a blues song with its AAAB-repeat phrasing. I highlight the virtues of this simplicity because it throws much of the rest of the album into a stark contrast and exposes its greatest weakness: many of the other songs on “Future Nostalgia” feel fussed-over and patched together out of pieces that don’t always fit, as if the several writers*** involved in these songs weren’t in the same room when the track was finally put together. The album seems to be a case study in throwing everything at the wall and not bothering to consider whether it will stick. And yet it seems to have a small army of critics defending it, even going so far as to call it the pop (or at least Pop) “album of the year” – which has me wondering exactly what all the hype is about.

“1989” has something that a lot of other blockbuster Pop albums since its release do not: a personal touch. Taylor Swift worked hard prior to that album at building her brand as a confessional singer-songwriter, and even with the big-name productions and radio-primed hits, she maintains that image: one of her biggest “1989” hits, “Blank Space”, explicitly addresses her (supposed) romantic history and relationship to the media. Elsewhere, she does some fantasizing about classic movie archetypes and the impulse to drop everything and run away from it all, strongly reminiscent of her past work. It’s not as easy as it might sound to pull off this kind of thing, and I think Swift deserves credit not just for the excellent musicality of the songs she put her voice to, but the consistency of the strong personality she built across her career (with misstep “Reputation” sticking out as the glaring crack in the portrait).

So I won’t compare “Future Nostalgia” to “1989” beyond the initial poptimism narrative it bolsters. No, “Future Nostalgia” isn’t particularly personal – its mode seems to be more in line with what Robyn was already doing a few years before Swift, anticipating a poptimism that would effectively result in her deification over the course of the 2010s. Similar to Robyn in her “Body Talk” series, Dua Lipa seems to approach “Future Nostalgia” with a kind of assumed confidence as a dancefloor queen – more celebratory than confessional.

The celebration, however, proves to be pre-emptive; “Future Nostalgia” lacks two crucial things that “Body Talk” had in spades. The first is a general willingness to experiment. Robyn’s albums were packed with silly throwaways, but some of them stuck, and the best are featured on the collected version of the album, from the Snoop Dogg collaboration “You Should Know Better” to the cybernetic-pop-anticipating “Fembots” to the sassy “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do”. The title track of Dua Lipa’s album demonstrates a little bit of adventurousness, but it unfortunately flops, arriving in the form of awkward half-rapped verses that aren’t fun enough to leave a lasting impression. The only other potential outliers are the aforementioned “Cool” (which just happens to sound less disco than the rest but is otherwise a fairly standard, if well-written, pop song) and the album’s absolute nadirs, “Good In Bed” and the closing ballad “Boys Will Be Boys” (we’ll get to that in a bit). Otherwise, the album carries its aesthetic pretty consistently between tracks, giving little impression of any desire to experiment.

The second missing element is the consistency of the songs themselves. When Robyn’s songwriters toss her, say, a pseudo-dancehall song, they commit to it, making sure there are no weird melodic/harmonic/rhythmic hiccups and that the pieces fit together. And unfortunately, the majority of “Future Nostalgia”’s songs are full of exactly those kinds of hiccups and disjointed structural assemblages that leave me scratching my head. A lot of it’s subtle to the point that I can almost understand other critics missing these details, but I pick up on this stuff fast, and once I hear it, I can’t unhear it.

A lot of it’s in the phrasing; too often, Dua Lipa will go for a quick succession of staccato notes in a chorus when a simpler, slower phrase, or maybe just silence would have worked better (see “Break My Heart”, or the post-chorus of “Future Nostalgia”, in which she sings the 100% non-credible line “I know you ain’t used to a female alpha” – side note, has she even listened to top 40 radio in the last decade?). “Physical” is almost fun until you realize that the phrasing, melody and harmonic structure of the chorus would fit perfectly into any godawful Nickelback song.

Actually, “almost fun” is one of the phrases that I feel best describes so many songs on this album. Too many of the tracks set up something great only to follow through with some baffling songwriting choices. The second track in, “Don’t Start Now”, disrupts an excellently-phrased verse and infectious bassline with a chorus awkwardly parachuted in from what sounds like a 90s house song. The more in-character post-chorus that follows can’t help the song recover once you realize that it’s nowhere near as endearing as the original verse melody. That half-assed rapping makes a re-appearance in the bridge of “Levitating”, which is otherwise perfectly acceptable. If not for that moment, “Levitating” would come close to being the third pick of my favourite songs here, although you can’t fool me, Dua Lipa: I know that chorus is just a sped-up re-hash of the Jacksons’ “Blame It On The Boogie”. “Pretty Please” is also fine, funky and subtle, displaying some restraint on part of the songwriters and producers for once – though there’s also nothing about it that jumps out and grabs me. Besides the two standouts, is that the best I can hope for on this album, a song where nothing goes horribly wrong? At any rate, it’s better than the bland, shameless Lily Allen rip “Good In Bed”, which also features an utterly confounding “pop” sound effect in the chorus replacing one of the mind-numbingly repeated words.

There are some exceptions with regard to singers that can make use of this kind of disjointedness. Ariana Grande’s “Sweetener” walks a thin line, but it often pays off. See, Grande is a singer’s singer, at least by Pop standards; she’s known for crooning, for belting, for singing her lungs out. But she also wants to be a Pop icon to young people right now, and that means staying up-to-date in her production and songwriting. The trouble is, one of the most popular genres with the kids these days happens to be trap, which doesn’t exactly lend itself to Grande’s showboating vocals, favouring short, choppy phrasings and half-mumbled half-singing mixed almost low enough to blend with the music. So she compromises: some of the songs on “Sweetener”, such as the title track, have verses and choruses that feel as though they’re pulling in opposite directions, with Grande getting an opportunity to flaunt the long high notes in a percussionless section before dropping into those staccato bursts that suit the heavy 808s of trap. Despite it being more drum’n’bass/R&B throwback than trap, a similar dynamic is at play in Grande’s biggest hit from that album, “No Tears Left To Cry”. Unlike Dua Lipa’s lurching song structures, Grande’s feel intentional and thematic; the songs aren’t always bulletproof, but I feel like I learn something about her by hearing the tension of styles she’s struggling to stretch herself between. All I feel like I learn about Dua Lipa from the messiness of her songs is that either her, her songwriting team, or both are very confused about what goes into an effective pop song.

Of course, Ariana Grande is also operating in a slightly different mode than Dua Lipa in the first place: whereas Dua Lipa is engaging Pop radio in the recent tradition of satisfying formulaic hits like those of “1989”, Grande has one foot (or maybe even one and a half?) in the parallel tradition of R&B. While the two traditions frequently mix and crossover on the radio, they represent very different approaches to music whose distinction might provide some insight into why some of what Dua Lipa is trying to do isn’t working.

To put it simply, the basic unit of what we’ll call traditional pop is the song, and the performer of the song is meant to convey the essence of that song as a relatively unwavering whole – the performer is effectively the conduit for the song, which reaches the listener through the medium of the performer. The singer has some room to “interpret”, but once a given interpretation is found to be effective in its “hook” potential, it’s typically kept as part of the formalized song, written in stone, more or less.

R&B, true to its roots in “rhythm and blues” and, before that, jazz, essentially reverses this. Songs are present in R&B and not necessarily unimportant, but they typically become conduits for the performer’s own expressiveness. In this setting, the performer’s “interpretation” is actually the most important ingredient, as the performer’s style is effectively the product, the listener’s focus. This places greater emphasis on experimentation with phrasing, melody and other aspects of a song, as well as the potential differences between multiple recordings and performances of that song.

These two paradigms have consequential implications for singers of songs operating in a given mode. A traditional pop singer, for example, is going to be more likely to defer to the song as-written in their performance of it for a recording. An R&B singer, by contrast, is more likely to improvise, often delving into explorations of how to make their voice a more expressive instrument – in many cases, actually, it can be a matter of making their voice more like an instrument, full stop. The notes aren’t sung to express words so much as they are sung to express pure sound. Vocals can vary wildly in rhythm, giving off phrasings that might normally be considered unnatural, but, if placed artfully enough, can re-shape our expectations of pop music in the first place. These aren’t ironclad rules, by the way – the genres cross over frequently and the lines are often ambiguous. But I think defining the differences here can at least help us understand the split in the approaches of, say, Taylor Swift vs. Janet Jackson.

Arguably, the biggest R&B star in the world at the time of writing this remains Beyonce, and with fairly good reason: her powerful voice brings a lot to what are often already well-written songs. Take note here: something like “Formation” (which I have previously written about in my article on hip-hop’s inheritance of the post-punk legacy) or even “Drunk In Love” probably wouldn’t fly in the realm of Pop. Tracks like these are mainly embellished not necessarily with flashy songwriting or production flourishes (although they can have those too), but with Beyonce’s vocal interpretations of them, sometimes approaching something more like rapping than singing****. Note also: vocalizations in this context are given a certain freedom, a license to be weird within a certain range of acceptability. Need I remind you of “surfboard, surfboard, / Grainin’ on that wood”?

My point here is that R&B singers are playing by different rules than Dua Lipa. This isn’t just me arbitrarily deciding that what she’s doing isn’t “R&B enough” – you can here it in her approach. My criticism of her awkward phrasing is based largely on the fact that it doesn’t sound like she’s doing it to “experiment” with the songs she’s given. She repeats these phrases exactly the same way each time, as in the chorus of “Break My Heart”, just so you know it’s intentional. If she is, in fact, improvising, the songs aren’t very suited to it and her attempts are mostly unsuccessful; they become hooks that highlight their own weaknesses rather than bold forays into new rhythmic territory.

The most interesting part of “Future Nostalgia” is, by far, the backing music. Even when Dua Lipa’s singing and hooks fail, the production shines through (even here, though, there’s a caveat with regard to the last two tracks). Consider the sublimely gauzy vocal(?) loop at the beginning of “Levitating”; the sweeping disco violins of “Love Again”; the finger-popping funk bassline of “Don’t Start Now”; even the Justice-lite bass synths in the chorus of the otherwise by-the-numbers “Hallucinate”. “Physical”’s best aspect is, in fact, a small countermelody running in the background of the obnoxiously bland chorus.

This is where I can most understand what got music critics hyped up on this album in the first place: superficially, at least, it sounds pretty damn good. But I suspect the willingness to overlook its other obvious faults stems from a tendency among “poptimistic” critics to treat singers as interchangeable in a system they perceive to be dominated more by “sounds” than by music proper. In fact, the singer is a real make-or-break point in much of modern pop music (Pop or otherwise), likely due to the focal point they occupy; a great singer can occasionally salvage a terrible song, while a bad (or even just mediocre) singer can easily bring down the most well-constructed powerhouse hit.

A case against valuing “Future Nostalgia” solely on the basis of its production: the last Pop album I remember listening to where the production outshined the songwriting was Billie Eilish’s “WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP WHERE DO WE GO?” Eilish’s songs aren’t bad, and are frequently even good – but I was surprised at how conventional, or even “traditional”, most of them were. “Bad Guy” and “All The Good Girls Go To Hell” are basically jazz songs. “Xanny” and “Wish You Were Gay” (the most lyrically immature, it must be acknowledged) are pretty standard singer-songwriter fare. Others tend to play to a type: either sleepy ballads (“When The Party’s Over”) or, the most interesting songs on the album, the hip-hop influenced minimalist pieces (“Bury A Friend”, “You Should See Me In A Crown”).

But of course almost all of these songs are transformed in part by some rather astonishing production. No one who’s heard “Bad Guy”’s synth-squiggle chorus would mistake it for jazz, and the chorus of “Xanny” squirms in a shroud of distorted bass that pull back when you least expect it – hardly typical sonic territory for most singer-songwriters. Even the already-powerful “Bury A Friend” hits harder than it might have without the surging crunches it’s afforded in the production.

My point, however, is not that the production is what makes this album – it doesn’t, at least not entirely. The production is roughly half of what’s interesting here. The other half is comprised by two things: the fact that most of the songs are fairly strong already (though I think Eilish could lose a few of the ballads and come out better from it), and the fact that Billie Eilish also happens to have a very distinct vocal style. Actually, that last part alone is probably the selling point for most people: Eilish’s eerie half-whispered delivery plays more of a role in constructing her album’s overall dark mood than the production. It has its limitations, and I wonder what her future will bring in terms of her ability to move beyond the role she’s effectively typecast herself in, but it has something on Dua Lipa: it has personality.

So vocal style is important, but that’s not all: as I mentioned, Eilish’s songs are also consistently  stronger than Dua Lipa’s, even when both are at their lyrical worst. Sure, “Wish You Were Gay”’s self-absorbed whining about unrequited love and sexuality sounds exactly like what you’d expect to come from a undeveloped teenage singer. But the lyrics are the only thing wrong with that song; take those away, and the melodies and instrumentation sound pretty damn great. The same cannot be said for the overblown dollar-store balladry of Dua Lipa’s execrable “Boys Will Be Boys”, which, despite projecting an ostensibly more “progressive” outlook than “Wish You Were Gay”, falls flat on its face anyway. And I’ll take an Eilish ballad over “Good In Bed”, which sports an obnoxiously repetitive chorus – static, plastic, it sounds like a strained smile looks, desperately trying to convince you that this is fun, right?

“But wait,” you might say, “pop music is supposed to be fun! And isn’t that what most of ‘Future Nostalgia’ aspires to? Shouldn’t we forgive Dua Lipa for some of her mediocre songwriting if her goal in making us dance is at least a defensible one?”

And the answer is no, because Pop is already full of music more fun than this. The way I see it, there are several ways in which one could make music more fun than “Future Nostalgia” (better songwriting being one I’ve already discussed to death here), but I’ll wager that a fairly reliable method is that frequently employed by Lady Gaga: do something musically outlandish and downright weird.

“Bad Romance” is the obvious lodestar here, but Gaga’s career is full of the absurd: just take pretty much any song off of “Born This Way”. Even the “normal” songs like “Yoü and I” (at least pre-“Joanne”) come across as weird by virtue of being placed next to something like “Electric Chapel”. And all this is done in the service not only of raising eyebrows, but in the name of fun. Even some of Gaga’s weaker efforts like “Venus” (or many others on “Artpop”) have a winking slyness to them that lets you laugh along with her. It rarely feels like she’s “serious” when she’s singing about love, sex, or dancing all night, but she gets you dancing anyway.

“Future Nostalgia”, by contrast, has few attempts at any kind of weirdness, and those it does have fall flat. I’ve already mentioned the cringe-y pseudo-rapping, but the spoken-sung pre-chorus of “Physical” is just as embarrassing, bringing the song’s momentum (its second-greatest virtue) to a screeching halt with an awkward phrase that feels totally unnecessary. And then there’s that sound effect on “Good In Bed”. These moments detract from the album because they feel half-assed, like Dua Lipa never bothered to commit to the bit she tacked on. And aside from this, “Future Nostalgia” remains pretty conventional Pop – she’s not exactly reinventing disco here, just emulating it for a new generation with mixed results. If only she could pull a “Heartbeat” or “Love Hangover” out of her bag, but the album is so radio-oriented that the songs rarely reach the 4-minute mark even when they find a groove worth hanging on to. It’s as if she mistook the law M.I.A. ironically lays down at the end of her biggest hit for sage advice: “Remember: no funny business!”

There is one more aspect of the poptimism that helped propel this album in the eyes of critics I have yet to discuss: the paradigm’s coinciding with the recent wave (is it the fourth? I’ve lost count) of popular feminism. This was significant for Taylor Swift at the moment of “1989” because it allowed for interpretations of songs such as “Blank Space” to reach beyond a simple commentary on her stardom and discomfort with media coverage, branching out into a more expansive reading of the song as representative of the ways in which women in general are demonized for their past relationships. Feminism, as a cultural framing device, was crucial in shaping listener perceptions not just of “Blank Space”, but of many other songs on the album. It also helped to launch a whole wave of emerging and returning Pop artists’ albums and singles that traded in similar (vaguely) politically-charged lyrics.***** In the years that followed, a veritable opening of the floodgates would happen with regard to public feminist consciousness-raising, culminating in specific incidents such as the #metoo movement.

For the record, I think this was largely good. I’m under no illusion that “1989” is in any way a politically radical album, but I think the return of pop feminism has generally had a net positive influence in getting pop artists of all kinds of re-think their music’s relationship to gender politics. That being said, there are two things I resent about its lasting impact. The first is the kind of forced extrapolation of songs that bring up gender in any way into “feminist” anthems when they’re largely about relations that have little to do with the matter. One case in point might be Dua Lipa’s pre-”Future Nostalgia” hit “New Rules”; inexplicably, I often see fans trying to make the song’s lyrics out to be some kind of political diatribe about the cruelty of men to women or something like that, when in fact it sounds more like a typical “bad relationship” song, the kind that have been on the charts for decades by now.

But the other thing I’ve come to dread from pop-feminist Pop is the inevitable half-assed “message songs” that seem designed to cash in on using feminism as a signifier that an otherwise apolitical artist is still hip and knows what’s up. Whether through “New Rules” fan encouragement or her own hubris, Dua Lipa has regrettably chosen to end “Future Nostalgia” with such a song: “Boys Will Be Boys” (no relation to the significantly better-written song of the same name by Stella Donnelly). I don’t really want to write a lot about this song because part of the problem with it is that it’s bad in a lot of boring ways, but I do think it’s significant that it was singled out by several other critics (even those who liked the album) as the album’s worst song by miles. I’m hoping this shows a change in perspective here, as critics get harsher about flops like this one, and hopefully the eventual end result from this pushback is that Pop stars will stop trying to convince us they’re “real feminists” with empty songs like “Boys Will Be Boys” that are tacked on to the end of their “bangers” album as a kind of placating afterthought.

So a number of critics have indeed placed too much stock in this album: contrary to the feeling you may have gotten from my relentless criticisms here, “Future Nostalgia” isn’t necessarily bad, but I wouldn’t call it “good” either. It sits in a mid-tier of Pop albums over-enthusiastically pushed out during this era of high poptimism. It’s not the next “1989”, or “Lemonade”, or “Body Talk”, or “WHEN WE ALL ETC.” It’s just a mediocre album with a few great songs that were somehow never released as singles.

Is the inflation of “Future Nostalgia”’s reputation a sign of poptimism’s imminent bust? Are we entering a period of critical groupthink and gradual decay? These questions are too big to answer here, or perhaps at all for now (likely we’ll know the answer for sure in another decade). But I want to end this on a positive note by singling out a singer I haven’t mentioned yet as perhaps the greatest Pop artist of the last 20 years: in all these comparisons, I never got around to bringing up Rihanna.

On one hand, much of the poptimist revolution in criticism has involved taking the studio albums of Pop artists as seriously as their counterparts in other genres. On the other, Pop has never really stopped being a singles genre, and few have demonstrated this better than Rihanna. This is not to deny that she’s released some totally listenable, or even great, albums in her own right: “Talk That Talk” and especially “ANTI” stand as excellent records that came along relatively late in her career. But, well, raise your hand if you’ve actually listened to, say, “Good Girl Gone Bad”. Now raise your hand if you know “Shut Up And Drive”, “Don’t Stop The Music”, “Disturbia”, and, of course, “Umbrella”. See what I mean?

Perhaps I could blame “1989” again in part for this shift in focus from Pop singles to Pop albums. It’s pretty remarkable, after all, that the album is as consistent as it is, and I think that might have caught a lot of critics who were expecting otherwise off-guard. I think another problem, however, resides in the dominant mindset among critics in the first place, the idea that albums are the more valuable art form, the standard by which greatness is measured. Even I find myself incapable of breaking free of that format of evaluation – I’m much less likely to seek out more of an artist’s stuff based on a few great singles of theirs compared to if I hear an entire album from them that I like.

This might be slightly unfair of us critics, but there are workarounds to help correct this bias. One of those workarounds is the compilation. If an artist can make an album’s worth of great songs, but they happen to be spread across a number of their otherwise-mediocre albums, they can still win favour by collecting all (or most) of those gems in the same place, a “greatest hits” collection being the most common******. This seems like a pretty reasonable way of enjoying singles-oriented artists for those of us who are still stuck on the old album format.

But compilations have also never been as popular to review among critics as studio albums (I don’t know, maybe many feel like it’s cheating to collect the best stuff in one place?) and, as stated, it seems like poptimism’s paradigm shift has only reified the bias towards albums by putting more weight on Pop artists��� studio albums than before. Further, as compilations have started to die out (since anyone in the streaming age can assemble their own “greatest hits” playlist that will have all their own personal favourites on it), recent Pop artists often aren’t even given the chance to be evaluated at their best in a compilation format. I wonder if this is also a contributing factor in the hype surrounding “Future Nostalgia”; though it would probably be better remembered for its singles which could be collected on a later “Best Of Dua Lipa”, the fact that such a collection is unlikely to materialize pushes critics towards trying to sell listeners (and themselves) on this being Dua Lipa’s “definitive statement” and reason to take her seriously as an artist simply because it’s the most consistent thing she’s released so far.

Regardless, Rihanna is a model artist in terms of being a singles-oriented Pop singer deserving of a great compilation. If someone were to put it together, I’m fairly certain it could rival Madonna’s “The Immaculate Collection”, the former (basically archetypal) gold standard for a Pop artist’s greatest hits. Imagine hearing “Umbrella”, “Work”, and “We Found Love” all in the same place, uninterrupted by the inevitable string of lesser artists’ hits you’d inevitably hear if that place was the radio or some poorly algorithmically-generated playlist. My concern is that with the death of the compilation and shift in the expectation for the Pop artist’s studio albums to be their defining moments, such an album will only ever exist in an unofficial capacity. Which is fine, I guess – if you hate pop canon. But I don’t, so I patiently await the return of a collective memory for singles that extends beyond the radio and the playlist.

*Interesting to see how these examples have aged.

**Don’t get me wrong, I like “1989”! But its potentially negative influence will be detailed further as I continue.

***This isn’t a criticism of songwriting teams in general – certainly great songs have come out of the modern collaborative approach to pop songwriting, and I’ll get to those soon.

****And of course there’s a whole other conversation to be had about the ways in which hip-hop and R&B, formerly more separate genres, have been in the process of merging for the last two decades as performers in each have realized how much their interpretive approaches have in common.

*****It should be noted that this trend started several years earlier in “underground” and “indie” scenes and only just made its way into the Pop mainstream around 2014, but that’s a discussion for another article.

******Actually, even if an artist has only one great song, multi-artist compilations can step in to help. But since I’m focusing mainly on the respective cults of personality of specific Pop artists here, I won’t get into those. I should also add that Pop is by no means the only genre in which this happens: there are definitely so-called “classic rock” artists who I wouldn’t bother listening to outside of a compilation of their best stuff (Queen, for example).

[magpieslocket]

#writeyourwitchcraft

Inspired by this post, I wrote down my answers to these prompts in September 2019. Revisiting the list, I have rewritten my answers for January 2021.

The long long prompt list and answers follow under the cut.

What draws me to witchcraft?

Witchcraft draws me in as a tool of self-reflection and self-improvement.

How do I see the divine?

I see the divine as a human creation out of necessity. We seek patterns in a chaotic universe, and divinity is the thing beyond us that laces together disparate parts into a seamless whole.

What in witchcraft makes me happy?

Tea, oils, incense, and community.

Do I want to follow a path that has to do with a little nature, or a lot of nature?

A lot of nature. I believe we need nature in our lives, and the closer we can get to it, the healthier we are.

What areas of witchcraft would I like to learn more about?

Regional biodiversity, ethnobotany, divination outside of tarot, more about tarot, more traditional Americana regional styles of craft.

Where do my witchy talents lie?

Visualization and empathy.

What kind of deities, if any, do I want to honor?

I don’t currently work with any deities.

How do I believe magic works?

If it works, it works by sympathetic principles of energy flow and positive psychology. I think we manifest what we believe. I think we have the most powerful computer on the planet riding around on our shoulders, and magic is a way to program ourselves.

Simple or elaborate spells/rituals? Why?

As elaborate as is needed. I believe that some pageantry acts as a trigger in our brain to start recording, so to speak. By performing a ritual, we are telling ourselves we have power to affect the outcome of events. Some elaborate steps can help us believe it better, as we are so trained to see simplicity as ineffective.

What are my views on cursing/hexing?

I believe it is pointless, as it only increases the pain and hate in your own heart, and will seldom affect the target unless the target knows they have been cursed. On the other hand, I don’t believe in some “karmic” return of the reflection of the power used. I think it is fine for others, but I don’t seek it out. 

Do I want to practice something similar to my ancestors?

I am wary of Norse reconstructionist religion because so much is based on so little in the way of sources, so I have no idea how similar the practice is to what my Danish ancestors would have really known. In spite of this, I have always been drawn to Norse mythology and have Huginn tattooed behind my ear. I try to balance my own Norse leanings with some Americana / Appalachian tradition.

What are the basic morals and ethics I feel I should live by?

This is such a difficult question to boil down to a few sentences. I believe we are all human together, and as such, we must treat each other with dignity and respect. Not because of some reward for doing good, but because we wish to be treated with dignity and respect ourselves. 

What in nature am I drawn to; the ocean, animals, the trees, etc?

All of it.

Which (witchy) holidays, if any, would I like to celebrate and how?

I celebrate the Wiccan Wheel of the Year with friends because while none of us are Wiccan, we are all flavors of Pagan, and find the regular breaking of bread together fun.

How do I believe divination works?

Divination is self knowledge passed through the veil that obfuscates authorship. We project our gut feelings onto a medium made to soak up and amplify those feelings into readable patterns, then read those patterns without acknowledging our hand in making them.

Would I like to work with a group some of the time, all of the time or not at all?

Some of the time would be grand, Covid willing. I would love to find more like minded people to practice with.

Which aspects of witchcraft appeal to me most, which the least?

I love the trappings of witchcraft, and despise the gatekeeping, racism, and antisemitism that plague the community. The sense of community and the ceremony of witchcraft appeals to me in so many ways, but I find a lot of fault in the community at large for cultural appropriation of people it then fetishizes. 

What do I believe happens to us when we die?

I think we go dark, cease to be, and are mourned. I think our body returns to dust and our mind was only ever a flicker of light in the darkness in the first place.

How do I see mythological creatures?

I think most mythological creatures are based on hearsay of living or extinct animals, that knowledge passed down from ear to ear and from generation to generation, changing and becoming unrecognizable to its original form, like a strange game of Telephone.

When do I feel most magical?

I feel magical when I am in a flow state. When the rest of the world melts away and I can focus entirely on the task at hand.

How much is witchcraft woven into my daily life; is this too much, too little or just enough?

I feel that right now, it is just enough. I use visualization to boost my mood, my confidence, and my energy, and I use meditation to relax, soothe anxiety and depression, and be more mindful of my body. I use crystals and teas to affect change in my emotional states.

What kind of witch do I feel I am?

If I had to choose, Green Witch. I feel most connected with the energy of plants.

Which texts/quotes best describe my current path?

There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments. – Janet Kilburn Phillips

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. – Greek proverb

Remember that children, marriages, and flower gardens reflect the kind of care they get. — H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Do I like research and gathering info, or do I like things handed to me?

That is a loaded question and I don’t like it.

Which things about witchcraft worry or scare me?

I worry about becoming overly dependent on magical thinking and not taking the reins to my own life.

What is my favourite element?

No way to say.

How do I see gender (roles) in witchcraft?

Gender is not a binary experience, and gender roles in magic often feel like outdated trapping of a different time. I feel that society is catching up with the expression of gender being something varied and personal and that the witchcraft community is catching up too. I simply ignore anything that takes it upon itself to assign gender roles to magical correspondences. 

Am I interested more in magic, or spirituality?

I have had great talks with friends on the difference between the two. How do you define it? I think I prefer spirituality as a pattern grid that lays over life and gives meaning to senselessness.

Do I like to be told how to do things, or would I rather figure it out on my own?

That depends on the thing! I prefer to be told how to fix a car or not poison myself with homemade tea, but I like to figure out my own methods for programing my attitudes. 

What rules, if any, do I live by when it comes to witchcraft and magic?

I had a lot of trouble with this question. There are simple rules, like “don’t eat strange herbs without ample research” and there are complex rules, like “try not to appropriate closed cultures” - I think that like the ethics and morals question, it boils down to treating others how you’d like to be treated.

What do I gain from witchcraft and magic?

I gain a feeling of autonomy, to self-direct my own brain. 

Formal or informal rituals/spells? Why?

Informal, because who’s to say what is formalized. 

What subject do I love to study?

Oh everything. There isn’t a bad subject to study.

What is my favourite type of magic; candle, sympathetic, sigils, etc?

Sympathetic magic is one of my favorites, and sigils are a common topic of interest for me. 

What would my perfect witchy day be like?

What does this question mean? “April 25th — because it's not too hot, not too cold. All you need is a light jacket!”

Would I want to be dedicated/initiated?

Sure, if I trusted the people doing it.

Who do I honor (ex: deities, ancestors, myself, etc), and how do I, or would I like to, honor them?

I honor myself with mindful listening.

How do I create a sacred/witchy space?

I create the space by engaging with my five senses. Creating texture, scents, sights, and general ambiance to enrich my experience and captivate my senses. 

What do I believe is needed for a successful spell/ritual?

Intent and belief. 

Which cultures do I draw from in my witchcraft?

Norse, Hellenistic/Greek, American/Appalachian.

What is my learning style; books, websites, videos, more hands-on?

I’m still experimenting with content, but I think websites and hands-on.

What, if anything, in my mundane life influences my witchcraft?

Chronic depression and anxiety influence my witchcraft because they influence my energy levels and ability to engage with the experiences. 

What are my hobbies, how do I (or can I) incorporate them in my witchcraft?

My biggest hobbies are writing, drawing, and painting, and I use all three to explore my craft. I use writing to question and define, I use drawing to explore, and I use painting to honor.

Where do my non-witchy talents lie, how do I (or can I) incorporate them in my witchcraft?

Art is where most people would say my talent lies. I have used stormwater to add interesting energy to paintings, and would do so again in the future.

What would my dream witchy life look like? What steps can I take to work towards it?

My dream witchy life is running a combination gallery space and witchy store. Steps I can take would be to continue honing my craft (art and magic) and building the skills necessary to run a gallery space successfully.

What would my dream sacred space/witchy home look like? What steps can I take to work towards it?

Plants, plants, and more plants. Statues, paintings, and prints of powerful imagery. I am working on my gardening dreams, and my art dreams, so continue to do both of those things.

What symbols correspond with me; runes, animals, flowers, gemstones, etc?

Stags, deer, wolves, smokey quartz, rutilated quartz, snowflake obsidian, pothos.

Am I an open and proud witch, or do I (need to) hide my craft?

I am a very private person in real life. I don’t share my craft with anyone outside my direct family and close friends.

What are my favourite witchy items/tools; divination tool, ritual tool, décor, clothing, etc?

Tarot cards are my current obsession. Some of the magpied shiny bits that I have collected over the years, from sharks teeth to perfume bottles, make the list. 

What is holding me back in my craft?

Issues with mental health, physical health, and self-doubt.

What is my pre-spell/ritual routine?

Grounding myself to the Earth.

What are my ultimate witchy goals and how can I work towards them?

I’m not sure how to answer this. I guess, to be more mindful, to be more content, and to be more present. I am working with myself through therapy and ritual and setting small achievable goals to work towards those things. 

I implore @theodoravanyar and anyone else who takes the time to read this long slog of words to consider writing their own answers down for the new year. 

[grannygerd]

I’m Lynn from PVRIS! AMA

I’m Lynn from PVRIS. We just put out our new album Use Me which you can listen to HERE. This Saturday, we’re going to be playing our first album White Noise front to back in its entirety for the first time ever. You can get tickets for the live stream HERE.

Proof: https://imgur.com/9K4IgJf

DieDunkleFritte: Hey Lynn, would you rather have really small hands or really small feet? Best regards from germany :D pvrisofficial: Feet!!! Need normal sized hands to play instruments! haha

Nikkiestables: Lynn!!! I was in the US for my exchange and was going to FINALLY see you in person but I couldn’t:( do you think in the future you would tour Asia? Which parts would you like to explore? (Please say Hong Kong) pvrisofficial: We'd love to tour Asia more! We've loved the places we've been in Japan, Singapore, & South Korea so far! Would love to add Hong Kong!

ShadeOfNothing: Hey Lynn! I’ve been a PVRIS fan Since White Noise and I’ve loved seeing the band’s sound evolve through the years. I know you’re a huge believer in astrology, past lives, and the paranormal, so I was wondering if there were any crazy experiences you had witnessed or drew inspiration from while writing/producing Use Me. Thanks so much! pvrisofficial: yessssssss I am a nut. I didnt make Use Me in a haunted church this time but i DO think I stayed at a haunted airbnb. Food kept disappearing and then one night a giant ghostly handprint was left on my guitar case and my hand was way too small to have created it.

hinterscape: Hi Lynn! I've been following you guys since ~2014, you're awesome and I look up to you. Do you see yourself making music forever or how long do you see it if not? pvrisofficial: FOR-E-VER! It might take different forms and go through different stages but i think i will always be creating music!

imaliveunfortunately: Hi Lynn! First of all I love you and the style of music you've put out recently. I saw you at Reading last year, and in Manchester in 2017 so I'm really happy to seeing PVRIS get the exposure it deserves :) So it's gotta be asked, I understand there's issues with the label, but what are the chances of Mvdonna and Blood On My Hands being released? Whether it be as singles, on a new EP, the next album, etc? They're just damn good tracks pvrisofficial: I want them to come out SO BAD too haha. I want to make sure the production is perfect so its now a matter of finding the right collaborator for them.

CookThePasta: Do you believe in life after love? pvrisofficial: yes

OldManMalekith: Hi Lynn! How did working with JT on Use Me differ from your previous experiences with producers? Everyone that I've seen or heard work with him puts it as a really positive experience, and he helps make great stuff! pvrisofficial: He is the BEST. He was very similar to Blake in the sense that he was incredibly nurturing and encouraging, dedicated to making sure it was 100% everything I wanted and always stood up for me if the label ever tried to change it. His production style is definitely different but its extremely diverse. It's a lot punchier and crisper and a bit more minimal than in the past but i think it almost makes things more impactful that way!

villanelleinsuits: Hi Lynn! You’re a creative genius, thanks for existing. If you could live anywhere in the world where would it be and why?? pvrisofficial: I would love to live in the UK countryside!!! Maybe Bath or something.

Queenio01: How are you feeling today? pvrisofficial: Sleepy but EXCITED to rehearse!

dancorcoran: How often do you get recognised by fans in day to day life? pvrisofficial: Not too often! I usually get recognized at coffee shops and starbucks though? and Lush hahaha

jessica_pasta: Hi Lynn!!! Was wondering how do you make your synth patches? What synth sounds are your favorites? Thanks so much! Love PVRIS and all that you do ❤️❤️❤️❤️ pvrisofficial: I use Zebra a lot and also use a Prophet Rev2. One of my favorite things is to throw synths through different effects to get an entirely new sound!

ImadaPC: Hi Lynn, I got a question. What inspires you to make music and why? pvrisofficial: What inspires me is wanting to hear something I havent heard! I want to hear all my favorite artists and influences into one thing so that's usually how PVRIS stuff is inspired haha.

staceelogreen: What are your stand out albums of this year!:) pvrisofficial: Great Q! 070 Shake - Modus Vivendi Tinashe - Songs For You (technically 2019 but I've been jamming it all year) They. - The Amanda Tape KAYTRANADA - Bubba (2019 but it came out late 2019 so it counts as 2020 for me!) Howling - Colure

DH00338: What are you most excited about in terms of this new era of PVRIS? pvrisofficial: More writing!! and more collaborations!

creewitch: Hiya Lynn! I hope your morning is going well. When have you felt the proudest of yourself and why? ☺️ pvrisofficial: Oooo good Q! I always think there's room for improvement so it's hard to feel pride, but I am definitely grateful for my resilience through the crazy shit haha.

liky_gecko: Because you’re from the Boston area, what are your favorite spots to eat/hang out there? I may be going to school there pvrisofficial: Do itttt! My fav spots are a little outside of the city.... the Crane Estate, Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Maudslay State Park in Newburyport, Portsmouth NH, Shedd Park Cemetery in Lowell.

goszkv: Hi Lynn! Was wondering if you'll ever consider coming to Poland :( ofc post corona pvrisofficial: yes!

cecy_db_11: Hi Lynn! Can't wait to see you guys this Saturday. How do you feel once the songs you write (your personal feelings and thoughts) are available for the world to listen? Do you get used to that over time? pvrisofficial: Still getting used to that to be honest. Once songs are out, I weirdly stop listening to them. Prior to that I listen in the car a lot and drive around testing songs out haha.

musicfan1976: Do you think the spring 2020 shows will still happen or be rescheduled again due to Covid? Stay healthy and take care. pvrisofficial: I truly have no idea.... :( you take care too! <3

yikesmiles: Hey Lynn! I hope you’re well! I’ve always been curious, what was it that inspired you to make music? pvrisofficial: Good Q! WHen I write, I try to write music that I want to hear that hasn't crossed my path yet.

LeahLNurse: Is there any unreleased songs you wish made it onto White Noise? pvrisofficial: Nope!

JRuiz1775: Hey Lynn! I remember the first time I saw and heard you guys was when you opened for Pierce the Veil and Sleeping with Sirens. I was hooked and have tried to see you guys anytime you are in my area. My question for you is what is your favourite tour experience? What is your dream tour to be on? pvrisofficial: There's SO many favorite tour experiences. I love touring the UK and Europe a lot, exploring before shows is my favorite thing and has some of my favorite memories. Our UK/EU tour with BMTH was one of my favorites.

ac-36: hi lynn! i love your music so much, it means a lot to me. if you were to remake your past music now, how do you think it would be different, and what do you think the future direction of the band will be? pvrisofficial: I would definitely approach the drum production a bit different but keep it pretty similar with the other textures/instruments! Future direction can go anywhere! Definitely want to keep taking risks and trying new things, but still keeping it dark!

staceelogreen: If you could go back in time to give yourself advice, what would you say to your past self? pvrisofficial: Take it easy on yourself.

NouveauJacques: Hi Lynn, huge fan and I love the power behind your music. Do you ever write songs that are too emotional and feel conflicted about putting into an album? pvrisofficial: usually if they feel too emotional or heavy, I know they need to be released haha

Defiant-Strawberry37: Hi Lynn, hope everything's okay with you and the band. I'd like to ask you what PVRIS' era you think is the best and why? Hope I can see you guys someday soon acting in Portugal. Love you all! PS: why so Lynnda? *portuguese pun intended, beautiful = linda in portuguese* ly! pvrisofficial: Thanks! I love every era tbh but I'm definitely always the most excited on the present moment!

pvrisbae: youre the cutest little soul ily. whats ur fav song at the moment? pvrisofficial: Brian showed it to me! It's "Too Late" by Washed Out.

agnespvris: Hi Lynn!! Have you had any good laughter when you've been looking through the #pvrismemes ?? pvrisofficial: oh you betcha.

whothefuckisrvmi: ok so im not understanding shit about this app but im here for you pvrisofficial: thank u

vioIentbounce: hi lynn! what do you think will be your favorite song from use me to play live? pvrisofficial: I think.... Good To Be Alive or Gimme A Min

jaydenc30: hi lynn I just wanted to say how much I appreciate you and everything you do! I hope you are doing well, what was the first song you wrote for use me? What’s does PVRIS’s future look like to you? pvrisofficial: First song for Use Me was Old Wounds! I wrote it before the second album even came out haha

IrlandaBDelao: Hi lynn, would you be down to open commisions for tattoos? If so, how much would you charge for a drawing? pvrisofficial: I wish! I do not have time to at the moment :( but if I have time in the future, you will be first to know so you can get first dibs!

CookThePasta: are you really looking at all of our memes?? pvrisofficial: trying OUR BEST!!

nonoplznowhy: why did your parents name you Lynn? pvrisofficial: Lyndsey* but they always call me Lynn or Lynds. I was named after my mom's childhood bestfriend named Lynn, she passed away when my mom was pretty young :(

golrip: What is your favourite song on awknohawnoh and why? That album literally changed my life and shaped me into the person I am today so I would really love knowing your opinion. also: what's your favourite the weeknd song/album? pvrisofficial: NOLA 1! It was my favorite to write and the memory around that time is magical. We wrote it in New Orleans and it's my favorite city.

bnizz95: Hey Lynn!! I saw you guys perform for the first time live in Cambridge last September and im so excited about the stream. I was wondering what your favorite song/songs off this album are? Also, do you still steal rosemary from your neighbors? Hahaha pvrisofficial: hahaha I have a little rosemary plant that I use now :)

vioIentbounce: are you still making collages? if not, have you taken up any new artistic hobbies lately?❤️ pvrisofficial: Little collaging here and there :) I've been researching a lot of interior design and fashion design lately!

fee-lixdawkins: Hey Lynn! Excited for the livestream! I know you’re an AFI fan. What is your favorite album and song(s) by them? Would you ever want to tour with them? I’d kill to see that happen! Take care! pvrisofficial: Brian is the bigger AFI fan! I cant pick a fave Im scared

ivykrvft: How does it feel to (kinda) be performing again as an entire band after all these months? pvrisofficial: Really good!! Definitely going to be weird without you guys in front of us!!

Ariana_0918: hi lynn <3 i wanted to know when you saw florence in concert what was your favorite song she performed live? pvrisofficial: Cosmic Love. She played it first and it was acoustic, I instantly cried hahahaha

TheSinger_Z: Hey Lynn! How old were you when you first started writing songs? What is the most memorable prank/joke that you have pulled or has been pulled on you while on tour? How many instruments do you play and what’s your favourite? I just want to say thank you, you’re my biggest inspiration when it comes to music (I sing and I’m learning to play guitar and hope to do it professionally when I’m older as I’m only 14 😬), and I’m really thankful for you guys. I got meet and greet tickets for November 30th for the White Noise stream, so see you then! pvrisofficial: i was in the 3rd grade. the songs were horrible. Its not really a prank but we love having our in ear monitor tech do the worm on stage sometimes. Extra points when he does it in costume. I can play 7 instruments! Looking to add more to the arsenal over time. I love piano a lot and drums. Keep it up, can't wait to see you be a star!!! ALso the livestream is the 21st! DOnt want you to miss it :)

CheezeGrenade: I missed out on a lot of concerts growing up and I couldn't make it to a concert out of state that I bought tickets to about a year ago. Will you guys play through Awkohawnoh again in anyway? Such as Half/Winter/No Mercy/Walk Alone. Litterally that album and the one before got me through alot of depressive phases in my life and Awk has really inspired alot of my writing for a series I want to create someday. pvrisofficial: I cant wait for you to start writing it! You got this! We will be playing through AWKOHAWNOH but the date is not announced yet :)

srankie: Are y'all Pats fans? Red Sox? Bruins? Cause if not the Eagles family will accept you with open arms pvrisofficial: NEW ENGLAND/BOSTON ALL DAY BABY!

macauley7: Could u please ask harry styles if u could tour with him? I need a pvris x harry watermelon sugar vibes thanks pvrisofficial: I'll call him right now.

brisbubbles: Hey, Lynn! Can’t wait for Saturday! I was wondering, how do you feel about singing old tracks from WN since you relearned how to sing? What has that experience been like? Wishing you and Brian the best! xzlinx: I am wondering about this as well. Maybe I am just nosey but I wonder about the process of retraining your voice and what exactlt happened. It must have been insanely difficult on her mental health but goddamn what a trooper bc Use Me is unbelievable! pvrisofficial: Great questions!!! Singing WN is definitely a little challenging to begin with because I'm older and my tone isn't the tone of 19 year old me anymore haha. A big thing was anxiety which caused me to choke up a lot and tense my chords. Then when i was being coached, out of fear of damaging something we had to rebuild and start small and light which we think caused the chords/muscles to atrophy, which set it back further haha. I eventually went to another coach who then was able to take my "retrained" voice and then strengthen it up and rebuild it back to where it was before!

ImOnlyHalfAlive: Hey Lynn! First, I can't express just how much PVRIS has meant to me over the last couple of years. Your music has helped me through so much, and I will forever be grateful. My question is: What's a life mantra you've always lived by? pvrisofficial: Life mantra (theres a lot but this one I always connect to when it comes to career): Patience and persistence is key.

Okosano: Hi Lynn and greeting from Germany! The one and only important question here : Whats your favorite comfort food? pvrisofficial: Favorite comfort food...... Indian food! My absolute favorite.

Ok-Personality1480: What’s your favorite tea pls 🤠 pvrisofficial: Throat coat for singing, housemade chai for joy.

CookThePasta: Do you know the muffin man? pvrisofficial: yes

LynnGvnnFvn: What were the creative differences between writing an album like White Noise or AWKOHAWNOH and Use Me? pvrisofficial: Age, time, locations, different producers and collaborators!

unit525: How are the submissions for the meme competition looking? Any front runners emerging? pvrisofficial: It's a CLOSE call for a lot of them...

LynXiger: Which song from your discography is your least favourite and why? pvrisofficial: I wont say incase it is anyone's favorite!! hahaha

lgbtiffany: do you have a tendency to incorporate spirituality into your creative processes? love the album and can’t wait for the stream ✨❤️ pvrisofficial: I think creating is spiritual in itself! You're channeling sound and melody and MAGICCC! So yes!

vessed1: hiii. I’d love to know who found the White Noise mirror ☺️ pvrisofficial: Me too

LynXiger: What is your favourite genre to listen to? And how has this changed over time? pvrisofficial: I'm a big sucker for hip hop and pop... really anything that's catchy and hits hard and has cool production!

nicthehic: Hey Lynn! Been a huge fan for a long long time and took up doing music professionally because I was inspired by you and the rest of Pvris’ rise and work ethic. I was wondering if there was anything you would do differently while recording your first album and any advice to new ish band working on their first professional project (in the midst of covid no less) and any tips to make our first album just as great and timeless as white noise Thank you! pvrisofficial: Awww this is awesome! I'm sure you're gonna crush it! I definitely would have wanted to make the production a little different but keep a lot of the same fundamental aspects/textures. Do what YOU feel you want to create and dont feel any outside pressures. Crush it! Cant wait for you to record!

minidudette106: Hey Lynn, Do you ever think its crazy that people get tattoos of your lyrics & ones inspired by your music? also wondering what your thoughts are on pineapple on pizza? lol pvrisofficial: I used to get freaked out bc I didnt think my lyrics were great but now I think its so cool! haha.

Hot-Lime3627: Hi Lynn, how is Opal and the other cat whom you took care of during quarantaine doing ? pvrisofficial: They are back with their owner! I truly miss them every single day... they were my little fluffy pals.

kelcea244: How do you keep your creative muscle flexed so you’re ready to create? And do you create every day? EDIT: Also really sad you guys weren’t able to make it over to the UK this month! We’ll be so psyched for you when you do come! pvrisofficial: We are sad too!!! We can't wait to get back whenever it is safe to play shows there. I miss it every day! I try to create every day even if it's just 5-10 minutes, always good to keep those muscles flexed!

socksgrowonbushes: first of all i just want to say how much i admire you, you’re amazing :) my question is what is your favourite song you have ever written? is it one that’s on an album? one that hasn’t even been released? i’m curious pvrisofficial: Use Me!

LadyEpicenter25: What the significance of playing in Arizona?! pvrisofficial: Resources to make the stream happen and rehearsals happen :)

bitchesonthephone: I have one question and one question only: When will we get Let’s Go Vertigo? pvrisofficial: NEVERRRRRR

Antique_Performer_45: Hi Lynn! I’ve been a big fan of PVRIS for a few years now. Which song from Use Me was your favorite to write? I love you guys! pvrisofficial: Use Me! or Good To Be Alive!

JadeAdelaideee: Hello!!! You’ve been a huge help with me realising I was gay, is there anyone who you would look up to when you were younger who sort of helped ease that journey? 💕✨ pvrisofficial: tbh i didnt have many. It was the scattered bits of magical gay representation on teen tv shows like Degrassi/Skins etc. haha

brandonjback: what song are you most proud of from AWKOHAWNOH? pvrisofficial: Anyone Else and NOLA 1!

DixieF: A question I've been waiting ages to ask. Why are you guys so awesome? pvrisofficial: We got awesome parents!!!

Emmahumphrees: Out of all yours songs what is your favourite lyric?? pvrisofficial: "On the porch the ceiling's painted baby blue dressed to the nines just like the sky in early afternoon 'cause it's midnight and the ghosts might be coming soon" Its a reference to a New Orleans superstition that the baby blue porch ceiling would ward off spirits in the night to trick them that it was the daytime sky.

lgbtiffany: what was the most difficult part of trying to regain your voice when you were having troubles with it? pvrisofficial: Definitely just getting on stage every night knowing it wasn't working and having to pretend it was... haha. Super embarrassing.

cnnrtower: Hi Lynn! MA fan here who first saw PVRIS open for A Skylit Drive at the Palladium in 2013. Super incredible to watch the journey for the band / yourself as an artist! What was the first gig/experience that made you stop and realize that PVRIS was going places? pvrisofficial: one of our first headline shows in CT back in 2015. Show was crazy!!

KimLC24: I was just wondering how you get your inspiration to do your art and music? because it can sometimes be hard to even get motivated let alone create pvrisofficial: Totally relate and understand! I won’t lie, the older I get, the more I need to hype myself up and set a tone to create, especially when there’s so much music swirling around us at all times (the internet/streaming/etc). I almost always have a moody or dreamy movie/show playing on my ipad next to me while I work so that way there’s an inspiring visual going.

deadweighttttt: Hi Lynn!!! What’s your all time favourite lyric from the album?! pvrisofficial: HII!! "Do you even notice how easy you've got this? Taking wings off a goddess if I'm being honest"

Pvffreis: Hi Lynn, I have no idea how to use this/reddit but great to see you here! Hope you're doing good? <3 Update: I figured out how to edit comments ayyy I just signed up to ask you this very important question: Red or green apples? pvrisofficial: Idk how either but I think I got it!! Red apples! W PB

dancingonslowsand: Hi Lynn!! Been following PVRIS for a while and I’ve loved seeing how your sound has evolved over the years. Do you have any idea of what direction you want the band to go in the future? Or are you just riding the wave and seeing what happens? Also what’s your fav bird pvrisofficial: Thanks so much! I definitely plan to just keep riding the wave… I feel like every album leaves some room for the direction to go anywhere so the next chapter never feels too restricted. I have been feeling pretty hyped and high energy lately so I feel like it may reflect that a bit! Fav bird is… PENGUINS (even though people debate that they are mammals.)

pvrisofficial: Okay my friends, I gotta head out and get to rehearsals! This was so much fun, sorry I couldn't get to every Q. Love yall! See you guys so soon! <3

November 18th, 2020

[arecomicsevengood]

COMICS BLOGGING OF A RAMBLING AND DIGRESSIVE SORT

I am embarrassed to admit it, but I do believe I buy things as a way of coping with my own uselessness. I’d like to attribute a universality to this character flaw, and claim everyone spends money on things they don’t need to fill some sort of existential void at the center of their being. My habits are relatively healthy, some people get shitfaced in response to the stimuli that makes me simply want meat, cheese, and carbohydrates. I have at various times read books at a pace comparable to eating, where everything got finished to make way for something else, but just because “reading books” is viewed as something good for your brain doesn’t make the act of buying them feel any less like a bit of brainless consumerism, especially when one is broke, and a global depression looms. Still, considering my worries that the postal service and retail outlets might go away if we do not support them and this will make life even more unbearable I convinced myself now was not the time to be a spendthrift.

All this is to explain why I bought a handful of comics I wasn’t sure I even expected to be good. Namely, I bought a bunch of issues of Alan Moore’s Tom Strong that I wasn’t sure whether or not I’d read before. I intended to parcel them out and savor them, but when I buy snacks at the grocery store, they get eaten faster than the vegetables. I bought these, along with some other single issue comics, from wowcool.com. From Powell’s, I preordered the first volume of Taiyo Matsumoto’s Ping Pong, which should arrive in a few weeks. I also ordered a few new releases direct from Fantagraphics.

Most notable among these is the Olivier Schrauwen/Ruppert And Mulot collaboration Portrait Of A Drunk. I’m on record as liking all the artists involved, and this one demonstrates why pretty clearly: While Olivier Schrauwen specializes in comedy about dumb guys, itself a form close to my heart, Ruppert And Mulot are darker and meaner, so here the dumb guy is an indifferent murderer. Being set in a pirate milieu allows for pretty amazing sequences of action and hallucination to flourish, their skills at color and composition tie it all together. Highly recommended. The back of the book announces Fantagraphics will be publishing the Ruppert And Mulot books made in collaboration with Bastien Vives starting next year. Hopefully I will end up reading comics by people other than my known favorites this year, but during a period of belt-tightening, there’s no guarantee even one’s favorites will live up to the increasingly-burdensome expectations put upon them.

Still, those Tom Strong comics outperformed my expectations. I believe I discussed how much I like Chris Sprouse’s work when I wrote about Alan Moore’s Supreme run, but let me reiterate: There’s a handful of comics Sprouse drew in the early nineties (A Batman annual with a Two-Face story written by Andy Helfer, an eighty-page Justice League Quarterly story, the first few issues of Legionnaires) which are emblematic of a certain DC Comics skillset I really value: This George Perez style ability to draw a lot of characters, rendered with this Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez spareness, this Kevin Maguire sense of facial expressions, a certain openness to the faces which is youthful and attractive and optimistic. There’s something similar to Graham Nolan’s art too: I don’t know how much other people like this stuff, it’s not really “cool” or gnarly looking, but there’s an unobtrusive cleanliness I associate with the DC “vibe” of this era, which I find vastly more appealing than the sort of post-Image-studios runoff that was their standard look more recently. As much as I love a good stylist, his is a good house style variant. Considering that, it rules that Tom Strong is what Chris Sprouse is known for. Those early nineties comics all have a lot of panels per page, but Moore, working in a post-Image mode, lets him breathe and do action sequences. He’s not an explosive artist, his drawing has this sort of style-guide quality to it, that feels perfect for the sort of “platonic ideal of a mainstream genre comic” tone that their collaborations aim for.

Reading these comics, I realized a few things: One, I hadn’t actually read them before. Two, they’re twenty years old. The years have been kind to them, in that I spent them aging, and while I was really into Top Ten and Promethea as a teenager, I still suspect that if Tom Strong is your favorite Alan Moore comic you are probably a dad. There’s a heavily nostalgic quality to all the genre pastiche going on, and its anchored by this character who is pretty upstanding, possessing this sort of all-seeing but benevolent competence aspect, and the storytelling affirms his liberal values. Peaceful coexistence is treated as preferable to violent conflict. It’s the work where Moore’e desire to issue a corrective to what he sees as a negative influence he had is most evident, it genuinely seems to be trying to be morally instructive to a young audience. I don’t think any of these things are bad, but it’s pretty easy to see how, reading the issues as they came out, many of them would register as somewhat bland. I seem to recall comic book writers at this time like Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, and Mark Millar all deriding what they called “dad comics,” not necessarily talking about Tom Strong, as a way of hyping up their own efforts, many of which I followed more avidly at the time but do not expect would hold up nearly as well. (There’s an issue that’s a homage to old Captain Marvel Family comics, featuring a few pages of Kyle Baker art, I particularly enjoyed.)

After being reminded that Moore is a great writer, and never forgetting for a second we live in dark times, it felt appropriate to read From Hell again. I texted a friend and found he had started rereading it at the same time. I don’t consider it Moore’s masterpiece the way that contrarians that don’t want to give the nod to Watchmen do. While the darkness feels organic to the subject matter in a way it often doesn’t in Moore’s eighties superhero work, I do feel the whole “Jack The Ripper gives birth to the twentieth century” thing is a bit of a reach. I believe I will end up reading some of Eddie Campbell’s solo comics before quarantine is over, I am impressed by how organic the pacing feels, how natural it progresses while largely avoiding calling attention to Moore as a writer. The skill set that enables Moore to do a densely researched historical conspiracy thing is evident when he does a genre serial. Many of the elements in Tom Strong do not feel like they are imagined from whole cloth so much as they feel appropriated from various sources and then connected into this larger whole. The “peaceful coexistence” remit of Tom Strong allows for a structure where stories that seems tossed-off come back into play as plot elements. You rarely receive this kind of payoff from extended serials, but it’s built into the structure of screenwriting, and it is satisfying to retroactively realize like you weren’t having your time wasted when you thought you were.

I also ordered from Wowcool the Dunja Jankovic comics Sparkplug put out circa ten years ago. They’re very cool, reminiscent of Anke Feuchtenberger and Gary Panter, slowly shifting their sense of texture over multiple pages, so that while I don’t think I realized at the time these comics were released that they’re very well-drawn, it is obvious when you actually read them. I anxiously await her “Richter’s Game” minicomic being translated into English, though obviously this is going to be a tough year for self-publishers selling zines with widespread show cancellations. My hope is that Fantagraphics’ Now anthology will just start running work by people like Dunja, Alyssa Berg, Nick Norman, and Beatrix Urkowitz, but maybe there are good reasons for that not to occur. Maybe anthology pages can’t compete with the profits one stands to gain from self-publishing, or maybe my own idea of what I consider my broad-minded and catholic tastes would not actually appeal to large sections of the indie comics market, the same way my idea of what I consider “good” in mainstream comics is actually far too nostalgic a model for the aesthetic preferences of the market as it currently stands. I offer these recommendations solely as another way of coping with my powerlessness.