#old lady yelling at the clouds

[biff-adventurer]

fuck lore strictness. seriously.

i don't care if you're a spongebob squarepants oc adapted for xiv. that's way more interesting and endearing to me than a character pretending to belong 100% to the game. fan content will never be canon and that kind of authenticity is both pretentious and impossible. unless you're part of the actual writing team, your work will always be fannish. and fan content is only at its best when it interprets, creates or transforms its source material. that is how art is actually made. by pushing boundaries and commenting on the themes at play.

plausibility and its degrees are there to let people in. i don't care whether they want to opt into the world of that character or not. "it's too much of a stretch" is not the fucking same thing as looking down on people for being cringe. but it's often used as a cover for judgment and elitism, and that's literally the opposite of what the ffxiv team is about.

yoshi p said, if you believe it can happen, it can happen.

square enix is a company that wants to sell a game. if the demand in the fandom is strong enough, or even if their own rules get in the way of telling a profitably interesting story, they will even change the lore or disregard it altogether. that's what leads to inconsistencies. and, honestly, consistency is not necessary to understand the themes of the story. if you want to make it happen, you can interpret as you please.

obviously, media literacy is at an all time low. some people break the lore without even thinking about whether or not it's even the same game anymore, or if they'll find any partners to be compatible with them based on how much they deviate. there are people, in the same vein, who literally say, "if it does not exist in the game, there is no basis for this idea and we will reject it." that kind of conservative nonsense is full of pretension and repression. both directions lead you into nonsense and, depending on the person's biases, move them to write stories riddled with unintentional bigotry.

i used to think my meteor survivor one punch man himbo would be seen as the lowest of the low. nope. people i know, thoughtful people, enthusiastic people, have been treated like shit because of this attitude of elitism. yeah, yeah, it's nothing new, but it fucking sucks. we're all playing dollies. most people prefer the playing part of roleplaying without actually behaving as writers. but the ones who delude themselves into thinking they are good writers, then go on to treat others like they are less than, is fucking ridiculous.

anyway, i'd much rather play with foster's home for imaginary friends adopted for xiv than pretend to an imaginary standard unrooted in compassion or the spirit of real creativity.

[shingekinomyfeelings]

People really need to stop equating virginity/lack of sexual experience with someone being 'naive' and 'innocent' and any other bullshit terms indicating immaturity. Getting fucked for the first time will not imbue someone with wisdom or a deeper understanding of humanity or love or the realities of the world. Sorry if you think sex is literally magic, it's not.

Also, this shouldn't be a hot take, but if someone who has never wanted to have sex has never had sex, that's actually a good thing.

Don't you fucking dare imply I'm lacking something.

[heyclickadee]

Because I have a tendency to get stuck in art blocks and s t r u g g l e badly with composition, and because I think The Bad Batch is a beautifully shot show, I’ve started doing rough grayscale studies of bad batch to unpack how line and value can be used to direct a viewer’s eye to where people want the audience to look. (I’m doing it with other movies and shows, but I do really like TBB, so….) That way, if I’m sitting in a period where I can’t draw, then maybe I can at least learn something. It’s not fan art, it’s just trying to break the composition down and make it make sense to me, but I think it’s interesting so I figured I’d throw them all here.

So! Potentially very boring things under the cut:

The thing that started this off was getting sent a gifset of the scene in “The Return” where Wrecker gives Crosshair his armor back. It’s a great scene, and one of the things that allows for the show to pull that moment off is the way that most everything in many of the shots is designed to draw the viewer’s attention to Crosshair’s face so that we’re paying attention to his reaction. For example:

It’s not a very high contrast shot, but if we block out the basics, most of the lines in the scene are directing us towards Crosshair. Both Wrecker and Omega make movements towards him in this shot, and then this movement is sort of carried over to Crosshair via the various lines in the background/Wrecker’s arm/even the crate. Additionally, our eyes tend to be drawn towards points of highest contract, which, in this shot, include the lamps in the far background against the pillars (forming a line from Wrecker to Crosshair) and the light hitting Crosshair’s face against the much darker background. Between all of this most people in the audience are going to end up automatically looking right at Crosshair who is, of course, the main person we’re supposed to paying attention to here.

This isn’t actually a full frame. I sort of grabbed a screenshot over the interwebs for this one, but The Bad Batch actually has a very wide aspect ratio. From what I understand it’s shot and aired in a CinemaScope ratio (2:39:1 or 2:35:1, though TBB is 2:39:1). It’s basically super ultra widescreen, an aspect ratio used when a filmmaker wants to make something feel more epic or cinematic, and as far as I know it’s the same aspect ratio used for the original trilogy before any cropping happened. (For reference, The Clone Wars was also shot in a CinemaScope ratio, 2:35:1, but was cropped to 16:9 for airing on Cartoon Network, and Rebels was shot and aired in 1:78/more or less 16:9.) So an uncropped screenshot of TBB would look more like this:

This is from “The Outpost.” It’s actually a fairly dark shot with Crosshair faced away from the camera and the value of his figure blending right into the rest of the foreground, which actually comes communicate a sense of someone who isn’t trying to draw attention to themselves (to me, anyway), but our eyes are drawn to Crosshair anyway by every major line in the shot as well as the highest point of contrast converging right over Crosshair’s shoulder. That, and the line of his rifle/shoulder and the support pole forming a big, well, cross-hair right in that same spot. Otherwise, he would blend right into the foreground and be easier to miss.

Unlike Hunter in this shot from “Plan 99”

Where basically you’ve got the exact same thing happening, every line in the shot converges on Hunter’s location, but instead of using just high contrast to draw our attention, we’ve got a fairly middle-gray scene with our eyes being drawn to the focal point by having one bright spotlight.

The orange cross mark I’ve drawn here is just to mark the center of the frame, which I wanted to point out since, at least as far as I’ve noticed, TBB has a tendency to save center and slightly off-center shots for really specific moments. I’d have to check on that and what the pattern is, though, since a few of the remaining shots in this post are center shot. (Filmmakers area generally taught shoot in thirds or, alternatively, on a phi grid or other away from center set of focal points, though you do get some center shot movies and shows. I think Raiders of the Lost Arc has a lot of center shots.)

In fact, a pretty good example of shooting in thirds (or on a phi grid—I laid it out and I think it fits the phi grid slightly better) is this shot from “Faster”

Where you’ve got Tech and Tay-0 placed on slightly close thirds on either side of the frame. If we’re just looking at line and value, with this shot we actually get this sort of interesting back and forth between where our eye is being drawn. A lot of the lines in the shot are directing us to look at Tech, but then you’ve got one of the lines going through, and the sweep of Tech’s arm and datapad pointing towards, Tay-0, whose face and body are outlined with a much higher contrast in value. And then we have that one very bold arc connecting the two. The result of this is that our eyes sort of bounce back and forth between these two characters as they get into their conversation.

Most of these shots have had just one or two (at most three) characters, and there are many scenes of TBB with everyone where our gaze is sort of directed to the group collectively, but sometimes you’ll have group scene where our attention is directed more towards one individual than others, like with this shot from “Battle Scars”

Once again, you’ve got most of the lines in the shot converging towards Rex as well as Rex’s person serving as the point of highest contrast while everyone else sort of melds into the background in terms of value. He’s also the first (and maybe only) figure who breaks fully above objects in the background to be shot directly against the sky. Line and value aren’t the only things directing the audience’s gaze towards Rex in this shot—there’s actually a lot of desaturation happening as we move from Rex, to the other characters, to the far background that helps as well, buuuuut this is a grayscale breakdown so that unfortunately doesn’t show up...here. (This is a center shot scene if we’re going horizontally, but Rex’s head, which is really the focal point, is right around the top third of the frame; it’s not exactly a low angle shot, but we are still looking up at him.)

Anyway, the reason any of this is important is because when you’re shooting with an incredibly wide aspect ratio like this, there’s a LOT of information being conveyed with every frame. You can fit a lot of stuff on screen at once. And while people generally going to rewatch and pay attention to background details (if nothing else, TBB is a goldmine for those background details), you do want to draw your audience’s attention to the most important parts of the frame—especially when an individual shot typically lasts only a few seconds. Or less. Like with this:

So this shot from "Faster" is up for less than a second before the camera turns to follow the speeders and then changes to another shot, and I had a devil of a time even getting screengrab of it. (Mostly because I was trying to grab it on my phone, but that's not really the point.) In less than a second the people making this have to communicate where Tech's speeder is, what's happening, what we're even looking at, while the objects in the scene are all moving incredibly fast. .

So, to communicate that, you've got multiple speeders moving in the shot, but only one (Tech's) standing out in terms of value against a fairly dark ceiling, as well as a combination of some real direct one-point linear perspective and the more or less arrow shape of the ramp pointing directly at the point Tech's speeder is going to be when it reaches the peak of its crest over the ramp. That way we're already looking at where Tech is going to be before he gets there and end up following his speeder as he zooms by.

[switchscene]

It really sucks to see a well thought out post about witchy concepts or spiritual activities, one that makes you go "damn I really wanna look more into this," but the art that gets used with it is very clearly AI art. It makes me question even looking into the thing, it makes me wonder "was the whole treatise written by AI? Is it worth checking out, only to find it's complete bullshit (or arguably worse, only half bullshit and the half that isn't makes the whole thing wildly appropriative)?"

Maybe I'm naive but it feels antithetical to the whole thing. One of the biggest draws of witchcraft is learning, and I can't help but feel that element is lost when you have a computer regurgitate what it thinks witchcraft is, or when you present your research with a picture made by a machine. Credit an artist, cite a source (this is a great way to recommend new craft books to other witches btw), but for the love of all the gods please let your own soul shine through in the craft you share 🦊

[discobiscotto]

Just Guys Bein’ Dudes: A Needlessly Huge TED-Talk About Luca & Alberto’s Relationship

Ready for some big-brain BS?

Well, ready or not, here’s a “little” dive into how I interpret/perceive Luca and Alberto’s relationship.

Note: I’m referring to them as my own headcanon versions of them as men. It can certainly be applied to them as young adults and teens for sure, but I’m diving into ‘Ciao Luca’ territory specifically. So, there, just being clear on the who’s who.

What’s their deal anyhow?

Are they romantic partners? Are they attracted to eachother, yanno 👉🏻👈🏻? Buddies? Buddies with benefits? Are they even a couple? Are they husbands? What’s their deal?

So, a couple years ago when I was starting to get really busy with the headcanons, I went on a tear about their relationship to lay down some kind of clear foundation for it. I felt alittle conflicted at the time about how their relationship was going to feel/act like.

To me, because I love ambiguity, I wanted to keep that energy going from the original source material…but with alittle “oomph”…considering there’s been time and maturity tacked on. They can’t just be Pallin’ Around forever, something’s gotta give with chemistry that strong imo.

If I’m being honest, them being point-blank romantic partners felt too cliched and predictable/boring. Courtship, wooing, marriage…snore. It just didn’t feel like ‘them’ to me. It bordered heteronormative somehow. I was just …PUTTING MYSELF TO SLEEP.

Not to say they aren’t romantic, because they certainly are in their own right! It just isn’t the defining Vibe of their relationship.

As a queer lady with a pretty open mind in terms of what defines a relationship and/or bond, I believe that love expression is on a spectrum. Different strokes for different folks, yanno?

I scooted myself over to that old filing cabinet in my brain with random Greek Philosophy tid-bits (that I was impressed wasn’t put thru the incinerator) and I got polishing.

I remembered a few terms, like storge (family love), Eros: romantic, mania: obsessive/stalkerish love, agape, philia, the list goes on.

We’re gonna focus on PHILIA, typically deemed affectionate and/or “brotherly love”, I think also falls under platonic love.

We’re going to come back to this later☝🏻☝🏻☝🏻☝🏻☝🏻☝🏻☝🏻☝🏻

As a couple of seamonsters (first and foremost) the human concept of love may not necessarily compute to them. Not that they get confused or turn their nose up at it, but rather it’s more boxed-in and rigid than, I guess, fish love? Haha.

Example: homosexuality, bisexuality, and heterosexuality as concepts are human inventions to help humans navigate their life and their identity in the world, be part of a tribe, and potentially find mates.

They’re social constructs, like gender conformity, and Mondays.

Seamonsters really don’t have that. They’re similar to humans in alot of ways, but in terms of attraction, love, and social awareness, they just kindof ride the wave and go where the current takes them.

Opposite sex pairings likely happen more often because [gestures] instincts and Makin’ Fries. But just like humans, same sex relationships happen just as much!…but seamonsters have no concept of homophobia (strictly a human invention) so there’s no discouragement or imposed fear of the relationship…it just happens if it’s meant to and the world keeps spinning. [deep sighs]

Luca and Alberto are aware of human society and customs (especially now that they’ve been living amongst them for atleast 15 years). So, they still try to do-as-the-humans-do sometimes. They know that they feel a strong bond to eachother that can’t be ignored, and when humans sense a similar bond between each other they express it by being physically intimate, or giving gifts, or creating things for eachother, etc.

So, basically, it boils down to “I love my friend, so I wish to express that love for him like that [gesture].”

Now bringing it back to Philia up there!👆🏻

That particular source defines philia as brotherly love, both must be men (in the Greek system), they respect and take pleasure in eachother’s company, bond through exploring philosophical truths, and sexual intimacy or attraction is optional.

This other source takes it a bit further saying that we could be diving into “friends to lovers” territory which is the aforementioned “oomph” I was referring to. The bridge into Eros stuff without being completely rooted there (ie your usual romantic pair).

Their relationship isn’t based on physical attraction, but began as a close friendship that progressed into something more. Not built on lust, but on mutual affection and respect for eachother.

They are an “unlikely” pair. Where a hockey hug became alittle tighter, and the joined hands in a good old “Piacere Girolamo Trombetta” started to linger.

They feel safe with eachother, they love and prefer eachother’s company, they share eachother’s worlds and feel deeply connected in them. Alberto cooks meals for them because he loves Luca, and Luca gives Alberto [SPOILER] because he loves him back.

They share a “I can’t quite put my finger on it but I feel safe, warm, and happy with you, I enjoy your company and what we have, I love the feeling of you being close to me, exchanging warmth and heartbeats, and I feel like this is more than going out on dates or ‘picking out curtains’.” kind of thing.

They’re roommates who kiss and “play house”. They are in love…but express it in their own unique way. They are openly affectionate. They keep people guessing, they confuse the neighbors, they have an “inside joke”.

Alberto lays on the housewife schtick: straightening Luca’s tie and sending him on his way with a packed lunch.

They call eachother heteronormative terms of endearment, mostly to be cheeky. Sarcastic “Honey” or “Dear” followed by someone affectionately ending up in a headlock.

They love to play with the human version of “married life”, little do they realize they’ve grown genuinely accustomed to it.

They’re queer but have no name and nowhere they’d rather be except each other’s arms (that one place that makes perfect sense).

They aren’t married…they never can get married…but that doesn’t stop them from sharing their homes, their beds, and a last name written on their Christmas cards.

In conclusion, humans say they’re gay.

The Paguro’s say “They built a farm together.”

SOURCES:

[bananamilk2004]

yeah ok we've heard of butch fem ghost which is awesome showstopping amazing but if i may add onto that: the entire tf141 being butches. soap with the same mohawk stunting around in military surplus activewear to attract femmes (or other butches. she's not picky). gaz who– unlike her friends– presents herself as more of a bifauxnen with clean pressed shirts and a nice smile. price who's the hardest butch out of all of them; never shaving, foregoing bras, referring to herself with brazen terms popular in the older queer scene (all the while having the voice of a chainsmoker, so deep it can initially be mistaken for a man's tone) (maybe she even packs?)

just. ugh. butches…

and imagine if you were passed between all of them? spitroasted by their straps? omg

[paverage-blog]

It occurred to me (while looking for one I lost) that a fic rec list is like a good mixtape. And for those of you who weren’t kids in the 1980-90s my heart hurts that you may not know the specific feeling of making or receiving a perfect mixtape (no, a playlist is not the same! Hush up now, an old person is talking.)

And then it occurred to me that fanfics themselves are a little like a mixtape. You take things which already exists and which you love and you make them new. Maybe you put in an unfamiliar genera or artist as juxtaposition, you create a new story or feeling by recontextualizing, you reshape the original into what you want it to be or want it to communicate. Sometimes you go off on a hunt for something new to add and you expand your own horizons.

Or you are exposed to something that becomes your new obsession through what someone else shares with you. You discover artist you never would have found otherwise, and your horizon cracks a little more. Sometimes (in the really great ones) art accompanied the mixtape and there was a whole new layer of meaning and magic to explore. God, sometimes there were multiples and they become a series!

All of this mixtape making was a labor of love. A mixtape said, “Here, I took the time to make something out of what I love and I want to share it with you. I really hope you’ll enjoy it. I’m gifting it to you for free because I care about you and I hate capitalism.”

And that is what fanfic is to me: creating and sharing what you love, because you care about the fandom and you hate capitalism.

Thanks to all of you who take time to create and share your writing. Thanks for reading mine. Thanks for loving the characters and keeping the story going. MAKE MORE FIC REC LISTS!! (Also, fuck capitalism.)

[awakefor48hours]

I hate the tiktokifcation of the English language.

[ltleflrt]

I'm mad about the Midjourney thing, but I'm also resigned. This is going to continue to spread throughout the internet until there's some kind of legislation about it, and by then it will be too late. Like, where else are we going to go? Sure, there are small sites like Dreamwidth or Pillowfort, but could they handle an entire Tumblr exodus? Are you going to support them with subscriptions so they don't go under, when you wouldn't do the same for Tumblr? Where are you going to put your thoughts and your drabbles? Your art? DeviantArt already flipped this switch a while ago. Other big sites are going to do the same, and smaller private sites can't afford the traffic of Tumblr.

"Well I just won't post anywhere."

Okay? If you're someone I follow I'll miss your stuff, but that's your choice. I can't imagine stopping posting altogether because capitalism is ruining the internet. I'd miss the socialization. And while Tumblr's communities are less active due to the porn ban exodus and the influx of people who are allergic to the reblog button, I still see more activity here than I get on AO3 or Discord servers.

If there ever is a Tumblr alternative, I'm all for moving, but the current alternatives aren't inspiring. And wherever fandom goes it's gotta have a queue or what's the point. In the meantime I'll go toggle the settings on all my blogs, and I'll pass around "Hi Newbies, here's how you should personalize your settings" posts that include info on how to toggle the settings. And I'll vote for politicians who believe in regulating businesses while preserving privacy, and hope they can regulate AI in time for it to make a difference.

[nsfwitchy2]

Can a pet groomer and a sheep sheerer fall in love-

[raylangivins]

i know we like to joke about like rpf university on here or whatever but i would really appreciate being able to take a lecture where someone explains all the bob/dylan joan baez lore to me without me having to like. actually get into bob dylan.

[gwydionae]

Ok, serious question for One Piece fans.

Here's the TL;DR:

I'm at Fishman Island in the anime. I know lots of future spoilers for WCI and Wano. I love pre-time skip Sanji and WCI Sanji. I hate Fishman Island Sanji. The question is, as a Sanji fan, how much disappointment should I prepare for in Punk Hazard/Dressrosa/etc until WCI? Is he going to stay this obnoxious until then?

And here's the rather long explanation rant because sometimes you just gotta vent:

I started reading the manga, like, 20 years ago, but I dropped it during the Fishman Island arc. There were many reasons for this (some unrelated to OP entirely), but a big one was Sanji. He had always been my favorite character, and while there had been moments pre-time skip that I didn't love (see: Clear Clear Fruit and it's improper uses), I found he became downright insufferable after it. I don't have to love everything about a character for them to be my favorite, but FI pushed me past my limit.

I have since skimmed through Whole Cake Island and bits of Wano due to seeing spoilers that made me believe that may have changed over time, and I did really like the parts that I read. Well, most of them, anyway (see: invisibility and it's improper uses, Sanji). So between that and hype over the live action version, I went back and started watching the anime for the first time.

I am once again in the early goings of Fishman Island, and I am STRUGGLING. Every time Sanji is on screen my brain is warring between remembering what I like about his character and what I'm seeing play out currently. He used to be overly fond and protective of woman, to the point that his inability to fight them hindered the crew. Now he's an active pervert drooling in the face of every pretty woman who is hindering the crew simply by bleeding to death at the sight of any woman including his own crewmates. Had this happened, like, once, MAYBE twice, ok, it's a dumb gag, but whatever. But it's not a one off gag. It just keeps going, to the point where it doesn't feel like a gag anymore so much as an actual character trait. It's like his flaws (which can make for interesting character drama, like his inability to physically harm Kalifa) are now his core personality, and everything I liked about him isn't even there anymore. Heck, part of his training was to learn to cook foods to help his crew, and he hasn't even cooked anything yet, and he was separated from his crew for two years!

(Ugh, don't mind me, just unearthing feelings buried real deep a decade ago. ANYWAY)

I know he gets better. He'll never feel quite like his pre-time skip (especially pre-Thriller Bark) self again, but I know that WCI adds in some really interesting layers to his character, and while Wano still has his perviness turned up a bit higher than I'd prefer, there's real depth to his character to keep him from sinking back into the one note gag that is Fishman Island. He will get growth. He will go back to being an enjoyable and rounded character one day.

I just really need to know exactly how long I have to wait for that to happen.

Sanji is (obviously) not the only thing I like about One Piece. I like nearly all of the Straw Hats, I've gotten attached to more than a few side characters over time, and the fact that it's so long and hasn't (to my knowledge) felt like a mad scramble of retcons is highly impressive.

But here on good old tumblr, I expect people to understand about the blorbos. They're different. They're special. And feeling like I wish one of them would finally succumb to death by nosebleed is, to put it mildly, not ideal.

And thus the question at hand. Because if I have to put up with this Sanji all the way until WCI, I might just scream. But at least if I have the warning ahead of time, I'll know to expect it rather than fruitlessly hoping he gets better before then.

Just give it to me straight, doc. How bad is it?

(The one thing I know of him between now and WCI is that his mind/soul/?? gets stuck in Nami's body - not sure for how long or what all he... does... in there, though. So please spoil that for me. I do not want that kind of surprise.)

[muppetminge]

look i'm not going to pretend like my generation didn't have models that weighed less than a bag of sand and airbrushing in the magazines and all that shit because we did and that was fucked up too

but i get so like. genuinely freaked out by like filters on social media and those kinds of things. it makes me worry for the girls who are growing up with these things as normal. i just can't help but feel like a filter that tries to *correct* your fucking face in real time must be so so so much worse than what we had? even just the "silly/fun" ones still smooth out your skin and shave off half your nose and reshape your face. so many phones have magic smoothing as an automatic feature on the front cams. so it's like not even an active choice or something you're aware of. and so much of this world is based on selfies and videos so you're gonna be seeing it *constantly*. you take a selfie for fun but the photo is unrecognisable. it's not you. if that's not a breeding ground for body dysmorphia i don't know what is.

and we knew that those "model standards" were unrealistic and unattainable and they still fucked us up! but today you're seeing your peers all made up like that online and logically that must connect into a feeling of like. that should be attainable? but it's still not! and idk but that can't be fucking healthy.

it just feels like to me there's a difference between seeing heidi klum or whoever and then your classmate maria posting pictures with perfect skin, straightened nose, whitened teeth. it's like the insane otherworldly standards we grew up with has been pulled down into everyday life. idk i just don't think it's coincidence that today we have 15 year olds sharing anti-aging routines and wearing 5 layers of makeup just to leave the house. the standards for a normal face has been digitally altered

[tarisilmarwen]

At this point the only reason I click on post-Rebels speculation videos about what Ezra and Thrawn are up to is to mine the comments for my “Things That Annoy Me Specifically About This Exact Topic” bingo card and boy is fandom hideously boring and predictable in that regard.

[sleepynegress]

So, I just saw on my timeline that a young black goth artist who I am rooting for, Baby Storme is complaining because she got kicked out of a Target for trying to film a video there and... As an old... Um, what happened to the weird kids actually being weird? WTH are you doing trying to film in a Target of all places in the first place??? I mean you did the obvious thing and filmed in a graveyard already, but there are still crooked trees, ugly statues, public fountains, rumored haunted places... Hell, even a dumpsite would be more interesting. But a TARGET? Use your imagination, chica.

[fipindustries]

time be an old woman yelling at clouds: usually in any field or discipline when the younger generations look back at the masters of old and celebrate them as geniuses for their incredible accomplishments it is accepted that those accoplishments dont look as impressive to modern eyes. after all the field has grown and expanded since. new techniques were discovered, new tools were developed and made more widely available. the real accomplishment back then is they they were the first to do it and/or perfect it. one has to keep in mind that for the time those were true feats in the field.

i say one of the exceptions for this lies in the specific subfield of 2d hand drawn animation. i think whatever the fuck the nine old men at disney were doing back in the 30's and 40's looks still mindblowing now a days and that animators now a day who try to do the same still struggle to reach that same level of quality