#it is especially prominent when talking about David Duchovny/Mulder

[daynascullys]

because tumblr is the gif website, I feel like everyone here should understand the work that goes into creating a gifset. because I think not everyone does, and it’s a huge part of why people don’t respect gif makers the way that they should.

the simplest gifs you will ever see me post still take the better part of an hour to create. because in order to make a gif, you need the material—for me, that means taking screen captures of videos or finding a download for them, both of which take time. then you have to open photoshop and create your gif, which can take a really long time depending on how quick photoshop is, how long the gif you’re making is, the size, any number of variables. and then I always color my gifs from scratch. if there’s dialogue, I listen over and over to try to make sure it’s correct, sometimes I look up transcripts, and sometimes it takes time to decide how to break up the dialogue. so even if it’s a simple two-gif set of a short scene, it will take the better part of an hour at least. and again, this is for the simplest gifsets I create.

so when I gif a scene, I am spending at least an hour with that tiny little snippet of material. which means that whatever it is that is featured in the gifset, it’s something that I like or tolerate enough to spend at minimum an hour with it. and this is why it DOES NOT MATTER if you are not critiquing the gif itself, gif makers do not want to hear every negative thought you have ever had about an actor, character, scene, or anything else they may have made a gifset for. if you want to complain about something, make your own post.

do not take someone else’s creation as a chance to complain or make nasty comments about anything featured in it. if I am willing to gif something, it means that I am willing to spend my own free time looking at it and working with it and creating something with it. so even if it isn’t my favorite scene or character or actor or whatever, I like it enough to watch the same three second clip over and over again for the better part of an hour. and yes, you’re just one person, but imagine a gifset with 100 notes. say 50 of those are reblogs, and 20 have some sort of complaint in the tags. you only see the tags of people who reblog from you, but OP will see all the tags. which means it’s not just your complaint, it’s all 20 different complaints about the thing they liked enough to make a gifset for.

and look—I understand it’s your blog and you can say whatever you want. I understand that I am creating something to be seen by other people and I don’t get to control what people say or do in the tags. if you read this and think fuck that, I can do what I want, you’re right. the purpose of this post is to remind you that you can do whatever you want, but the consequence may be that the people who are creating content for your fandoms stop posting altogether because they get sick of reading everyone’s negative opinions.

all that said, for the love of god: if you like something, reblog it. send asks and tell people you like their creations. say it in the tags. send things to friends. DO NOT REPOST THINGS. if you want to reap the benefits of other people creating things, make them feel like their work is appreciated.

[myassbrokethefall]

#4, 23, and 45.

4. Maggie Scully or Melissa Scully?

I do have a soft spot for Melissa -- I had a long Sims adventure with her where she went to university, and I wrote a fic once about child Mulder and Scully and she figured pretty prominently and I felt like I got to know her that way -- but I can’t pick anyone over Maggie. She is one of my favorite TV mamas ever and my #3 character easily after Mulder and Scully, and she’s a big part of my favorite episode, One Breath. Plus she couldn’t be more perfectly played by Sheila Larken. Mama Scully forever. 

23. Which broke your heart more: Emily arc or William arc?

William, I think. It’s hard for me to stay un-meta about the William arc, but it certainly was heartbreaking. Those outtakes of Scully and Toddler William from the revival just about broke me, as did the scenes with William and Mulder, especially the movie-watching one. When he kisses William’s head I just...I can’t. My heart. Ouch. That one. 

Emily made me sad too, but as I think I’ve expressed here before, Emily was very much a two-episode arc (despite things leading up to it and her brief appearance in All Souls), and I don’t remember ever *really* expecting Scully to take her home and become a mom on the show. Christmas Carol in particular affected me very much emotionally, mostly due to Gillian’s acting, but the investment in her wasn’t as intense for me as in William. Part of the impact of the story was the shock of Scully finding out about her out of the blue (and they got me good with the misdirection that she might be Melissa’s child), but still. She was there and then she was gone. William was years of my Scully’s life invested. 

Also there is the (unfair, but true) issue of how the little girl they originally cast had too hard a time doing the part and had to be recast, and the little girl they recast with was way too old for the part and also had recently played an evil child on Millennium (which I presume is what made them think of her). She did great and it was lucky that they were able to get her in a pinch, but I felt a bit of a detachment from Emily from the beginning for that reason. (Set photos of Scully with the original kid had come out already and that was Emily in my mind’s eye.)

45. Why did you first start watching The X-Files?

I resisted it at first. I posted the other day about how I got obsessed with it after I did start watching it, but there was actually a period of time where people were telling me I should watch The X-Files and I was like uggghhh please stop I don’t want to. I had a friend at school who was really into it and kept telling me I would like it and I got pretty sick of hearing about it after a while. 

I think my very first encounter with it was seeing it in a magazine (TV Guide probably, maybe EW) and thinking it was a reality show. There was this show called Sightings that was like, people talking about their paranormal experiences or whatever, and I thought this was a ripoff of that. So I was not interested. But I also distinctly remember seeing a picture of Gillian (it was one of those ones where she has curly hair and is wearing the cranberry suit and they’re dicking around with a file cabinet...I think, or maybe the greeny ones where she has the same hair) and I thought she was British, probably because I thought of Gillian as being a British-y name, and she also just...looked British to me. I have no idea why. I mean, I don’t remember considering it consciously. I just had it my mind that it was some guy and some British lady hosting a reality show about people’s alien encounters. That strikes me funny when I think about it now that Gillian is Britishing it up hardcore. 

So I was like “Pass” the first time I read about it, but then my other encounter with it was I once channel-surfed past David Letterman and David Duchovny was on, and he was talking about the flukeman episode, and I remember my interest being piqued because he was funny and cute. By that time I guess I was aware of the show and the fact that it was sci-fi/drama and not Unsolved Mysteries, but I still wasn’t really that interested. I’m not sure why, because I like and have always liked sci-fi (I was still hardcore into ST:TNG at that time), but maybe I was more into spaceships and faraway galaxies than gritty conspiracy Bigfoot stuff. I don’t really remember, but it never occurred to me to watch it until my friend started bugging me about it.

So anyway, she left after a semester (we were studying abroad) and I think I started watching it out of sheer “what is on TV right now that I can watch while I eat my Super Noodles” desperation, and my first episode was Darkness Falls, and lo, I was hooked. I do remember emailing her and being like “remember you kept telling me to watch that X-Files show? Well”