#i mainly do more reading than anything LOL. if you go to archive.org you can search up michael barrier’s hollywood cartoons book (you can

[ducktracy]

hey what are some good youtube channels that are focused on cartoons and stuff? like reviews and the history of them etc :)

OH I DON’T REALLY KNOW AS FAR AS YOUTUBE CHANNELS... quite honestly i don’t really WATCH a lot of youtube. but KaiserBeamz (link) for one (who made the bosko video i just linked as well as the one second of every looney tunes cartoon), thad komorowski and bob jacques have a SUPER informative podcast where they discuss cartoon history (link)... SORRY THIS ISN’T MUCH!! i don’t really spend as much time as i should digging around for videos. i’ll certainly add on if i know of anyone and you guys are free to add your own recommendations!

[palmviolet]

Do you minds telling us for how many years you’ve been writing and maybe recommend some books? Thanks!

i LOVE this question omg (answer under the cut because it got very long)

so i’ve been writing for pretty much as long as i can remember. i was always inventing stupid little stories lol and sometimes they were original and sometimes they were basically fanfiction, before i knew what fanfic was. i distinctly remember writing some weird 101 dalmations fanfic in red felt tip when i was about six. i started writing original stuff that was actually decent about eight years ago, and around that time i was posting some truly terrible fanfic on fanfiction.net (i think it was mainly johnlock and downton abbey? yeah, i know.) then i stopped posting it and focused on my own original writing for a few years, got the germ of a novel of which i wrote about 50k words before stopping and deciding it was rubbish, actually, so there were a few years in which i barely wrote - though i was still writing fic but not posting it. (you do NOT wanna see what my google docs looks like. so many unfinished fics from fandoms i don’t care about anymore. SO. MANY.) 

then towards the end of 2018 i rewatched stranger things and it just kind of clicked for me. the first time i watched it my favourite character was steve but i couldn’t connect to it in the same way?? like i didn’t have any ideas for fic or anything, i just kind of watched it and moved on. the second time was very different lol. i rewatched it and i immediately focused on joyce and hopper, and then i wrote a fool to hold you just as a way of kind of exploring my ideas about these two. it was my first fic on ao3!! and it just kind of spiralled from there lol

every so often i get ideas for original fiction but they never really stick. i would definitely like to get back into writing it but not right now. i’m currently doing a degree in literature which takes a LOT of my creative energy, and what’s left i expend on writing fanfic just because it is easier, and there’s kind of instant gratification with comments and things, which i wouldn’t get with original fiction. but i will definitely go back to it - i miss it a lot, and writing so much fanfic has definitely taught me a lot which i can use. 

as for your second question- i LOVE recommending books. seriously, if you have a question about so-called ‘highbrow’ literature then come to me pls!! i have to use my degree for something!! it really depends what you’re after so i’m just gonna drop some of my recent favourites.

so the book i read most recently that stuck with me the most was infinite jest by david foster wallace. it’s a behemoth of a novel, over 500k words, but every single one of them is worth it. you read the first chapter and you’re like.... what? i don’t get it. curiosity forces you to continue, albeit begrudgingly, and then suddenly you’re on page 200 because it just.... clicks. you stop caring about how long and meandering the sentences are, how many diversions and digressions there are, how the timeline doesn’t make sense, how it wants you to flip to the appendices every other page. it’s just- it’s so immersive. i love it. it’s not the most progressive of books, i’ll grant you - it wins no awards for representation and there’s some less than flattering ideas about women in it - but tbh i’m not the kind of person who cares only about that. it was one of the first books in a long time that i didn’t want to get to the end of, because i was enjoying it so much. 

since i am basically jonathan byers in both music and literary taste, i would be remiss not to recommend some vonnegut. cat’s cradle is so surreal and compact and perfect (much shorter than infinite jest, if you find that intimidating). i also read his collection of short stories welcome to the monkey house, which is so witty and funny and easy to dip in and out of. there’s also his autobiographical collection of essays palm sunday, which is amazing. it says so much about literature and american life (and i actually reference it in my upcoming st fic ;) ).

if you’re looking for something older, arthur machen’s horror stories are great. they’re the precursor to pretty much all horror since the end of the victorian period - when you say something is lovecraftian, you should really be saying it’s machen-ian. (it’s just as well, because to my knowledge machen was nowhere near as awful as lovecraft was.) they’re all pretty short but they’re full of intrigue and creepy stuff. if this is something you’re interested in then it’s worth reading the turn of the screw by henry james, which is a classic victorian horror story. i recently wrote an essay comparing the two and the yellow wall-paper by charlotte perkins gilman, which is a very short but mind-bending feminist story.

i’m also a big fan of vladimir nabokov. lolita is of course a classic, with disconcertingly gorgeous prose. i also like invitation to a beheading, which is extremely weird but really gets you to engage with the act of reading itself. 

if you want humour (though there is humour in all of these books, save the horror stories), go for catch 22 by joseph heller. it’s so funny and so bitter and dark at the same time. lesser known is his novel something happened, in which basically nothing happens, which is the point. it’s also quite funny but very very bleak, and somewhat claustrophobic - so in the current quarantine climate perhaps not the best read, unless you’re a masochist lol. 

as you can probably tell from this list i am a massive fan of post-modernism. i absorb some element of everything i read, so you may well recognise influences of these books in my writing - or maybe not. who knows. lots of these novels can be found for free on archive.org, as they’re quite old now. 

anyway, that was very long. but thanks for the ask !! x