#just doesn't work

[nelson-riddle-me-this]

working on my Sunday In New York (1963) playlist and while I have issues with that movie I do also have great affection for it and this is shaping up to be a real good playlist

[the-gayest-sky-kid]

im gonna be honest i hate the new p3r opening cutscene. like a lot

[heretherebedork]

I feel like recently, K-Bls are distinctly developing their own flavor, compared to the predominant Thai, Japanese, and even Chinese Bls. While Japanese Bls, usually are the ones that come closest to depicting queer experiences in real life, compared to the simplistic use of tropes that define the genre of BL as in Thai ones; K-Bls seem to be carving out their own niche. It's distinctly low on heat (almost similar to the censored versions of Chinese ones), but instead, delving more on understanding and dissecting human emotions and interactions. They have a sort of indie feel, case in point, Blueming, Our Dating Sim, A Shoulder to Cry On, and now The Eighth Sense (honorable mention to Strongberry for propagating this style in the first place). While Thai Bls are becoming more and more explicit, with the heat quotient shooting up higher with every drama, K-Bls seem to be flowing in the other direction, but at the same time compensating for the lack of skinship and much shorter run time, with really engaging plots and direction and acting (which isn't a surprise given how good their entertainment industry is). Additionally what is surprising me in a good way is how pleasantly queer-coded K-Bls have recently been, trying to portray almost honest queer experiences, yet, in a way that doesn't deter the usual BL audience from shunning them for being too realistic/ boring. K-Bls have a lot to improve though, but I do think, I like the route they are taking.

It's definitely a different style, though I would not argue that Japan is doing the most authentic queer experiences. From what I've seen, Japan tends towards highly stylized shows that often only brush on any bigger issues and play with tropes brilliantly but not with lived experiences/

You know who I think did the most realistic queer experiences while still playing with BL?

The Philippines. Their first few forays, those first shows in 2020 and into 2021 were walking that line amazingly while playing with all different kinds of tropes.

But anyway.

I am enjoying the way KBL is playing with tropes, BL, and queer experiences but I've also enjoyed a lot of the ways Thailand has done it as well and I think some Thai shows (Moonlight Chicken) have done more realistic and detailed deceptions than most K-BL has been doing.

Now, at least part of this is that I don't tend to notice style so much as I notice plot and character. Which is why I looked at your listen of K-BLs and have them all in very different categories in my head and was surprised to see A Shoulder to Cry On in the same breath as Our Dating Sim because those shows are just... so hugely different to me. Like, so different.

I am glad they're going more realistic but I also worry because the more realistic shows go the more depressing, open or bittersweet endings tend to get and that's not what I'm looking for. The Eighth Sense is a big question mark to me.

And, honestly, some K-BLs are improving and some aren't. Because as the volume increases, so does the range. It's the same as Thai BLs. The more you make, the more will be good but also the more will just... be.

I mean, Korea has definitely gone the opposite of growing physical affection and it doesn't bother me... but then they make All the Liquors and I groan audibly because that show was a waste of... everything.

But anyway.

While many Thai BLs are simplistic that's also the nature of there being that many of them. Thai BLs are constant and everywhere and you're going to get a lot of shows that don't live up while the gems you get can be quickly buried.

I am fascinated by the grouping of Thai, Chinese and Japanese BLs though. Thailand produced so many different BLs and styles and have their own set of tropes that have created many tropes we see all over now. China is entirely censored and the older stuff tended to be much darker than what we see now and the fantasies are, again, censored even if they are enjoyable and use many different tropes and end up with very different vibes. And Japan ends towards live action yaoi with their own specific tropes, visuals and taste.... they're just as different from each other as Korea is from them as well.

Every country... no, every production house and sometimes even director has their own specific creation and expectations and yes you can group them by country (@absolutebl is better at that than me) but I don't think grouping Thai, Chinese and Japanese BLs into one clump and Korea into another area is... not how I would do it.

Korea is creating their own genre of BL just as Thailand did and just as Japan did and just as Taiwan has done and just as Vietnam is slowly working out. Yes, Korea is evolving fast... but so is Thailand, at least some aspects of Thai shows.

[troonwolf]

also not enough of us are talking about that creepy comment that implies the writers think teenage girls all just have their hymens unless they’ve had sex 

you lose that shit just from bike riding or rolling in the grass ffs

[inkskinned]

please i love you i'm begging you bring back suspension of disbelief bring back trusting the audience like. i cannot handle any more dialogue that sounds like a legal document. "hello, i am here to talk to you about the incident from a few minutes ago, because i feel you might be unwell, and i am invested in your personal wellbeing." "thank you, i am unwell because the incident was hurtful to me due to my childhood, which was bad." I CANT!!!!

do you know how many people are mad that authors use "growled" as a word for "said"? it's just poetics! they do not literally mean "growled," it's just a common replacement for "said with force but in a low tone." it's normal! do you hear me!! help me i love you please let me out of here!!!

[ineffable-rohese]

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this is my understanding of things...

David Tennant: wears a shirt and publicly says trans kids have the right to exist. Otherwise continues to just do his thing as a beloved British actor with no social media.

The UK Right: has an absolute fit, tries to call him a pedo, but it backfires and gets one of their own fired

David Tennant: wears pride pins in public venues and is supportive of his kid. Otherwise continues to do his thing and has a massive year as a beloved British actor with no social media.

LGBT Britain: give him an ally award for... Not stopping being a good dad and wearing pins while on TV.

David Tennant: accepts award with grace and humility and understanding that the bar for allyship is in the floor, and says he wishes a right wing politician would shut up (presumably about trans people).

Rishi Sunak and the Tories: tries to go after DT for impinging on freedom of speech.

When the Tories go down in flames, can we credit DT? Just a little bit? For lolz?

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

i'm begging you guys to start pirating shit from streaming platforms. there are so many websites where you can stream that shit for free, here's a quick HOW TO:

1) Search for: watch TITLE OF WORK free online

2) Scroll to the bottom of results. Click any of the "Complaint" links

3) You will be taken to a long list of links that were removed for copyright infringement. Use the 'find' function to search for the name of the show/movie you were originally searching for. You will get something like this (specifics removed because if you love an illegal streaming site you don't post its url on social media)

4) each of these links is to a website where you can stream shit for free. go to the individual websites and search for your show/movie. you might have to copy-paste a few before you find exactly what you're looking, but the whole process only takes a minute. the speed/quality is usually the same as on netflix/whatever, and they even have subtitles! (make sure to use an adblocker though, these sites are funded by annoying popups)

In conclusion, if you do this often enough you will start recognizing the most dependable websites, and you can just bookmark those instead. (note: this is completely separate from torrenting, which is also a beautiful thing but requires different software and a vpn)

you can also download the media in question (look for a "download" button built into the video window, or use a browser extension such as Video DownloadHelper.)

[oliveroctavius]

In Plagiarism and You(Tube), Hbomb says "If you consider something so obscure you can get away with stealing it, you do not respect it." Save that line for the next time someone tries to tell you that Roy Lichtenstein brought respect to comics as art.

It's since been pointed out that while Lichtenstein did copy one of Russ Heath's drawings of an airplane getting hit, the painting depicted above was actually copied off Irv Norvick, because Lichtenstein did this so many times to so many comic artists.

In Lichtenstein's defense, he was doing this in a time when comic artists frequently weren't even credited in the issues themselves. In his condemnation, he never even tried to check, nor has he made any move to pay or credit any of the comic artists who recognized their own work later on. Rather than elevating the "low art" of comics, he was widening the gap of financial success and respect even further.

The Hbomberguy of this story is art historian David Barsalou, who has now spent decades tracking down the original art and the names of the original artists used in Lichtenstein's most famous output. Here's the flickr gallery for the Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein project. Frequently copied were Tony Abruzzo, Ted Galindo, Mike Sekowsky, Joe Kubert, Jerry Grandenetti, and dozens more Golden Age artists who aren't very well known in comics circles, let alone art history books. Many of them died in poverty. That's something that the Hero Initiative, mentioned in Russ Heath's comic above, aims to prevent.

Also, Lichtenstein didn't even paint Ben-Day dots. That's a specific thing.

[go-learn-esperanto]

I see so many people starting to use Threads as a way to escape Twitter and yes, it's owned by Facebook's CEO and giving Facebook the monopoly of social media is bad but I think we should also talk about the fact that, you know, Threads isn't avalibe in the EU for privacy reasons????? That should be concerning to EVERYONE

[bet-on-me-13]

Danny commits to the Bit a bit too hard...

So! For the first few weeks after his accident, whenever Danny would try to help the people of Amity Park, he would be treated as a Villain.

No matter if he had just defeated the Big Bad of the Week or saved a Cat from a tree, everybody in town only saw him as a Monster or Villain to he feared and hunted down. Danny was really getting sick of trying to get them on his side, until Sam made a suggestion.

"Why not just...play into it?" She said, barely looking up from painting her nails.

It was just an offhand suggestion, but it stuck with Danny. Why shouldn't he lean into it? The people of Amity Park already saw Ghosts as Evil, and they already assumed he was in cahoots with the Ghosts attacking the town. Why shouldn't he just...play into it?

So he does just that.

From that day on, whenever Phantom was spotted he would dramatically monologue about his Evil Plans, or claim that another Rogues attack on the City was his own act of terror.

Box Ghost destroys the towns Warehouses? It was on his orders.

Ember mind controls masses of Teenagers? All part of his Plans somehow.

Every Adult in Town is kidnapped by Young Blood? Danny gave them over to a friend as a Gift.

He crafts an identity for himself as the most Vile and Horrible Ghost that has ever attacked the City, using his own infamy to cement his legend even more firmly. The town only sees a Monsterous Villain, who has eveded capture near effortlessly for months on end, who constantly attacks their City and gets away with it.

Of course he still needs an excuse for how his plans keep getting stopped, and he gets it when his girlfriend Valerie becomes the Red Huntress. Before that, he just claimed infighting or the Fentons getting lucky, but Valerie becoming the Town's Hero meant he had a plausible excuse for how he kept getting "Foiled".

Val was suspicious, because she was not as involved as Phantom painted her to be, but in the end she had no proof of him faking his defeats. And she couldn't come up with any explanations for why he would do that in the first place. I mean, who would fake being a Supervillain? It had to he something else.

This did come back to bite him a while later, when the Justice League decided that enough was enough, and dispatched Justice League Dark to recruit Red Huntress and help Deal with him.

Coincidentally, that was the same day Pariah Dark attacked the Mortal Realm and sucked Amity Park into the Ghost Zone.

And honestly? Danny had spent over a Year proclaiming himself as a Villain who commanded Ghosts to attack the Human Realm, and he had heard about the Right of Conquest being Absolute in the Ghost Zone, so why not make it official? Why not overthrow the Ghost King, become the Ghost King, and cement his identity as a Villain while also forbidding Ghosts from entering the Human Realm without his permission?

He may have gotten a bit carried away and forgotten that the Villain thing was a disguise...but hey! He was still preventing Ghost Attacks! ...mostly. That's got to count for something right?

He may have let the Bit run a bit too far...

...

Check the tags for more context!

[egophiliac]

we were fucking ROBBED

[yuri-is-online]

Leona mentions that scars are seen as a sign of bravery in the Sunset Savanna... so I assume that a lot of people probably find them sexy. I'm not sure if Yuu walks the red carpet with the boys in Tapis Rogue but like... can you imagine a Yuu with a really noticeable facial scar they didn't use makeup to cover up and everyone in the Savanna just going wild on magicam as soon as those pictures drop. Yuu checks their phone to see that they're trending because one very specific group of people is down bad horrendous and it broke containment.

[lotus-pear]

mourning black and the death of ideals

[anneapocalypse]

So, just curious how many writers and creators will have to be forcibly outed by relentless harassment before we acknowledge that "This queer characters was written by a cishet person and that's why they're bad" is not good criticism.

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[zosanbrainrot]

He's just a dude, a birthday dude