#shopping season

[bomberqueen17]

everything is ads

i was just complaining about this on a discord i’m a member of. (discord is. sigh. what is it. well it’s not the public internet. it’s not a substitute for social media. but it’s something. the incalculable harm done to fannish community by having so much of the active discussion now silo’d in these private, unsearchable servers is hard to state, but it’s a necessary retreat given that all the platforms keep proving themselves to be garbage. A N Y W A Y i had a thing i was gonna say.)

You are interested in an art form, or hobby. so you look it up on the internet. you find a creator who does the thing you like, and you follow them, probably on instagram currently. Their instagram has frequent posts about their art, which is great. Sometimes you can learn some techniques from them. But then they want to sell you courses in how to learn it. Of course they need to monetize, but it’s a bit off-putting; you just want to do this for a hobby, and want to learn how, and to have to pay to take a course in it is sort of beyond your means for this kind of thing.

And then like... half the posts are unboxings.They bought art supplies, which they are going to review for you. Here’s a haul video, which isn’t really even a review so much as it is just showing off each of these products. As they put them away, you can see that their storage is stuffed full of more and more unused stuff from all the previous haul videos and unboxings. Where are they putting all this? When are they using it? How much money are they spending on it?? Yes there’s an affiliate code if you want to buy one too, there’s a discount if you use it. Help a creator out. Support a small business!

I’m happy to support small businesses and I do like supporting independent creators but uh like... that’s... you wind up so inured to this constant buying of new stuff, and yes you can get a lil dopamine hit from shopping but my god, no. No. It is not harmless and it is not innocuous, when you are being constantly bombarded with this normalization of constant consumption.

(I have a fraught relationship with buying things. My ADHD Or Whatever It Is really likes the shiny new, but I have been broke most of my life, and my inability to do math makes me alternately over-conservative and reckless with money. I have had years where I spent almost everything I earned on frivolous bullshit. i have had years where I spent nothing that wasn’t on food or gasoline, and wore clothes with holes in them that didn’t fit and just made do and just lived smaller and smaller. This is a constant, ongoing problem, and watching a creator I admire unbox her new purchases of random shit literally twice a week does not help me untangle it, and that’s just one of the people I follow, seriously how does this person have the money to just keep buying more stuff.)

I know that the underlying problem is capitalism, specifically the current hyperconcentrated strain of it we have that means that the middle class basically doesn’t exist. When I was growing up, an author could make a reasonable career in the mid-list, putting out a book every year or two and living off the advance on the next one while the previous one earned out, and after a couple decades you could retire on the residuals. But by the time I was old enough to pursue a career, that line of work was dead; now you’re either a superstar or you’re grinding out two or more novels a year to make poverty wages if you’re lucky, and doing all of your own marketing too on top of it. Every industry has gone that route; anything remotely creative, there’s now no outlet for except hustling as a Content Creator on the Internet. You gotta have a little Etsy or a shopify, you gotta have a Patreon and make that worthwhile somehow. instagram wants a reel every day, you gotta game that algorithm for exposure, teach yourself video marketing on top of whatever it is you actually like. You can’t just work your undemanding civil service job and make extremely detailed tutorial pages in your evenings and weekends because you don’t have evenings and weekends anymore and every hobby has to become a slave to the grind.

So I’m not mad at the creators, I’m not mad at the people forced to hustle. I’m just so tired. The solution has to be systemic; yelling at the content creators isn’t going to fix anything. We need higher wages, we need better labor protections-- I know that’s unsexy and not a good slogan for anything but believe me, that is the bottom line here.

IDK I don’t have a punchline. I guess I want to gently encourage y’all to practice non-consumption as self-care. Be aware of that side effect of constantly being bombarded with ads, where you just sort of absorb this feeling that it’s normal to constantly be buying things.

I’m not saying don’t click on your little indie creators’ ads. I’m just saying remember that everything is ads. [Just this week I bought deodorant from an Instagram ad because the girl selling it was hot, I am not immune. I know fine well what I did. Listen I needed more deodorant anyway and I don’t find very many people hot so it was notable.]

And, bringing it around to be immediately topical, when we say don’t interact with corporate accounts here on Tumblr, we mean corporate. Don’t hate the tiny hustlers. This is maybe the only platform where they can still have any kind of meaningful reach. All the others have realized that you can make businesses pay to not be hidden, and if they don’t ransom themselves, you can hide them from their friends and customers, but Tumblr hasn’t hit that yet. That’s the real origin of the Instafluencer-- the actual brands’ ability to market directly is limited, so they have to find people to shill for them.

You can block ads. But when your favorite creator is shilling, you can’t block that without losing the parts you like too. it’s so fucking insidious.

[alenasbdesign]

Up to 50% Off

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[latisha-taylor-art]

I have some cute new sticker packs available on my Etsy shop! These stickers are waterproof and all fairly well sized that way you can see all of the details. I have been drawing a lot of cute creatures this year as I get ready for the fall, and I hope that you enjoy these designs too. And if you would like to get a these stickers check out my Etsy

[recny]

jacob anderson #1 lesdaughter enthusiast confirmed

[owllooker]

Gem’s fish market (fresh and not suspicious)

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

SFX Magazine Issue 372 - Designing Good Omens ❤ 😊

PRODUCTION DESIGNER MICHAEL RALPH REVEALS HOW THE SHOW’S CENTREPIECE SET, WHICKBER STREET, WAS GIVEN A DEVILISHLY CLEVER UPGRADE FOR THE SECOND SEASON

WORDS: DAVE GOLDER

Invisible Columns And Thin Walls “The new studio is Pyramid Studios in Bathgate – it used to be a furniture warehouse. And unfortunately – or fortunately, because I accept these things as not challenges but gifts – right down the middle of that studio are a series of upright columns. But you’ll never spot them on screen. I had to build them in and integrate them into the walls and still get the streets between them. And it worked.

“There’s all sorts of cheeky design values to those sets. Normally a set like this is double-skin. In other words, you do an interior wall and an exterior wall, with an airspace in between. But really, the only time a viewer notices that there’s that width is at the doors and the windows. So I cheated all that. I ended up with single walls everywhere. So the exterior wall is the interior wall, just painted. All I did was make the sash windows and entrances wider to give it some depth as you walked in.”

GOOD OMENS HAD A CHANGE of location for its second season, but hopefully you didn’t notice. Because Whickber Street in Soho upped sticks from an airfield in Hertfordshire to a furniture warehouse in Bathgate, Edinburgh. It’s the kind of nonsensical geographical shenanigans that could only make sense in the crazy world of film and TV, and production designer Michael Ralph was the man in charge of rebuilding and expanding the show’s vast central set. “I wish we could have built more in season one than we did,” says Ralph, whose previous work has included Primeval and Dickensian. “We built the ground floor of everything and the facades of all the shops. But we didn’t build anything higher than that, because we were out on an airfield in a very, very difficult terrain and weather conditions, so we really couldn’t go much higher. Visual effects created the upper levels.”

But with season two the set has gone to a whole other level… literally. “What happened was that the rest of the street became integrated into the series’s storyline,” explains Ralph. “So we needed a record shop, we needed a coffee shop that actually had an inside, we needed a magic shop, we needed the pub. To introduce those meant we had to change the street with a layout that works from a storylines point of view. In other words, things like someone standing at the counter in the record shop had to be able to eyeball somebody standing at the counter in the coffee shop. They had to be able to eyeball Aziraphale sitting in his office in the window of the bookshop. But the rest of it was a pleasure to do inside, because we could expand it and I could go up two storeys.”

For most of the set, which is around 80 metres long and 60 metres wide, the two storeys only applied to the shop frontages, but in the case of Aziraphale’s bookshop, it allowed Ralph to build the mezzanine level for real this time. According to Ralph it became one of the cast and crews’ favourite places to hang out during down time.

But while AZ Fell & Co has grown in height, it actually has a slightly smaller footprint because of the logistics of adapting it to the new studio.

“Everybody swore to me that no one would notice,” says Ralph wryly. “I walked onto it and instinctively knew there was a difference immediately, and they hated me for that. I have this innate sense about spatial awareness and an eye like a spirit level.

“It’s not a lot, though – I think we’ve lost maybe two and a half feet on the front wall internally. I think that there’s a couple of other smaller areas, but only I’d notice. So I can be really annoying to my guys, but only on those levels. Not on any other. They actually quite like me…”

Populating The Bookshop “The props in the new bookshop set were a flawless reproduction from the set decorator Bronwyn Franklin [who is also Ralph’s wife]. It was really the worst-case scenario after season one. She works off the concept art that I produce, but what she does is she adds so much more to the character of the set. She doesn’t buy anything she doesn’t love, or doesn’t fit the character.

“But the things she put a lot of work into finding for season one, they were pretty much one-offs. When we burnt the set down in the sixth episode, we lost a lot of props, many of which had been spotted and appreciated by the fans. So Bronwyn had to discover a new set decorating technique: forensic buying.

“She found it all – duplicates and replicas. It took ages. In that respect, the Covid delay was very helpful for Bron. There’s 7,000 books in there and there’s not one fake book. That’s mainly because… it’s a weird thing to say, but we wanted it to smell and feel like a bookshop to everybody that was in it, all the time.

“It affects everybody subliminally; it affects everybody’s performance – actors and crew – it raises the bar 15 to 20%. And the detail, you know… We love a lot of detail.”

(look at the description under this, they called him 'Azi' hehehehe :D <3)

Aziraphale’s Inspirational Correspondence “There’s not one single scrap of paper on Aziraphale’s desk that isn’t written specifically for Aziraphale. Every single piece is not just fodder that’s been shoved there, it has a purpose; it’s a letter of thanks, or an enquiry about a book or something.

“Michael Sheen is so submerged in his character he would get lost sitting at his own desk, reading his own correspondence between takes. I believe wholeheartedly that if you put that much care into every single piece of detail, on that desk and in that room, that everybody feels it, including the crew, and then they give that set the same respect it deserves.

“They also lift their game because they believe that they’re doing something of so much care and value. Really, it’s a domino effect of passion and care for what you’re producing.”

Alternative Music “My daughter Mickey is lead graphic designer [two of Ralph’s sons worked on the series too, one as a concept artist, the other in props]. They’re the ones that produced all of that handwritten work on the desk. She’s the one that took on the record shop and made up 80 band names so that we didn’t have to get copyright clearance from real bands. Then she produced records and sleeves that spanned 50, 60 years of their recordings, and all of the graphics on the walls.

“I remember Michael and Neil [Gaiman] getting lost following one band’s history on the wall, looking at their posters and albums desperately trying to find out whether they survived that emo period.”

It’s A Kind Of Magic One of the new shops in Whickber Street for season two was Will Goldstone’s Magic Shop, which is full of as many Easter eggs as off-the-shelf conjuring tricks, including a Matt Smith Doctor Who-style fez and a toy orang-utan that’s a nod to Discworld’s The Librarian. Ralph says that while the series is full of references to Gaiman, Pratchett and Doctor Who, Michael Sheen never complained about a lack of Masters Of Sex in-jokes. “He’d be the last person to make that sort of comment!”

Ralph also reveals that the magic shop counter was another one of his wife’s purchases, bought at a Glasgow reclamation yard.

The Anansi Boys Connection Ralph reveals that Good Omens season two used the state-of-the-art special effects tech Volume (famous for its use in The Mandalorian to create virtual backdrops) for just one sequence, but he will be using it extensively elsewhere on another Gaiman TV series being made for Prime Video.

“We used Volume on the opening sequence to create the creation of the universe. I was designing Anansi Boys in duality with this project, which seems an outrageously suicidal thing to do. But it was fantastic and Anansi Boys was all on Volume. So I designed for Volume on one show and not Volume on the other. The complexities and the psychology of both is different.”

[celesse]

Bring on the merry and bright 🎄🎁🌟

[livhowlett]

I don't of anyone has notice but there's an 'Amazing Mr.Fell" poster in the magic shop

Right over Crowley/David's shoulder

[wasyago]

welp, didn't manage to get everything out before season 10 started, but i gotta post it one way or another so here we go! heard there was a fandom swap game going on, wanted to do a couple promts of my own :D

[roe-oo]

business deal

[shepscapades]

Posted to Twitter for the first time in 5 years /silly DSFGNFGB So here’s my atttempt at a more finished piece, inspired by Doc’s newest episode :D

Actually recorded a short timelapse for this one too, so that’s below the cut :D

[dorywhynot]

You're a mess, angel.

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[alenasbdesign]

EARLY BLACK FRIDAY DEALS

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[voleurworldwide]

F!ck Kathy Tees Out Now ⭐️

Voleur Worldwide 2023

[latisha-taylor-art]

Stay Trashy - Greeting Card Design

More card designs on the way! This isn’t one of my Easter card designs, but I thought I would throw it out there for anyone who has a friend or family member that loves Raccoons. As usual, you can find my card designs on Redbubble so be sure to check out the link below. For those who want a Print, these are now available on my Redbubble! Green Version:…

[hiding-under-the-willow]

anyways. What