#stevem

[weatherman667]

The "GHIBLI" Batman

Thank you Glee-chan, who has long ago abandoned this unhallowed place.

Runtime:  24:04

[ferdifz]

The DARKEST Pinnochio adaptation: "A Tree of Palme" (2002), an anime by Takashi Nakamura

[rotary-phonecall]

sSteven h.ot....

Explodes and blows up

[ruthimages]

[merlin-wolfgang-trades-hale]

So Taryn Manning played Scott’s character’s ex-wife/baby momma in One Day as a Lion. 

I was like  👀 👀 👀

That’s almost one McGarrett away!

But of course my fanfic brain’s gonna do what a fanfic brain’s gonna do. So imagine if Joanie and Gracie were Danny and Mary’s twins. 

It hadn’t been love but lust that brought their girls into the world. Co-parenting with both of their personalities at those ages back towards season one had to be a balancing act. 

Somehow they’d have to end up in Hawaii just slightly before the Hesse situation(or if I can’ think of another reason idk) but it all ends up with Danny working John’s case like in canon, Steve comes back to the island and it’s all very canon-ish...until Steve realizes that Danny’s been staying at the McGarrett home longer than he has(minus the last couple of days. Danny heard Steve was making it for John’s funeral and they’ve never really met and  better or worse, he was getting to the bottom of his girl’s grandfather’s case, so he was staying in a motel for the time Steve said he’d be there) so more canon as Steve takes the task force, forces Danny to join, Steve’s tunnel vision is pretty bad because later he’ll be slightly embarrassed it took him too long to realize how much time Danny spent at his house “working on the case” but also helping with the girls. 

This is season one Steve so he wasn’t going to question someone who probably knew how to deal with kids to help his sister with her girls. Mary wants Danny to stop wasting money on the motel and just move back in full time. If he’s her baby daddy and working with her brother? Why not? 

Danny’s pretty sure Steve doesn’t know and she’s like, don’t be ridiculous, but sometimes people are blind to stuff when there’s a lot going on and not only did Steve just lose his dad, he’s still got a big fish to catch that’ll leave a stain on his career if he doesn’t, and all while adjusting to not being in the military any more. Mary ends up sitting Steve down and bluntly revealing Danny is the girl’s father. 

It’s a weird clash of protective older brother/I’m now your boss but we’ve been becoming friends mental gymnastics Steve’s got to do but he does. But Danny’s a good guy, they get more leads and they work pretty well together, the bickering’s also fun. Living in close proximity to Danny, as in the room down the hall(I’m very confused about rooms in this house, but it’s with the assumption that there’s the master bedroom that belonged to john that will then belong to Steve. With Mary’s and Steve’s old childhood rooms available. I can assume after he sent his kids away, maybe he had them made into offices later? Or if the house already had an office. idk but I’m assuming it minimumly had three. Steve gets the master bed room, mary takes her old child hood room, the girls get Steve’s old room, and Danny still sleeps on the couch for the time being so a McGarrett invites him to bed.) 

Is it Soap-opera-y for Steve to fall in love with his sister’s baby daddy? Yes...yes it is. 

But Scott’s Character had a baby Steve look a like with Taryn’s character! And I’ve been watching more Spanish novelas so...to ponder at.  

---

I mean it also inspired some CA:TWS ideas too because the actor who played Rumlow is in One Day as a Lion as someone Scott’s character knew, so Danny having a dangerous fake SHIELD/actually HYDRA ex-lover who comes to the island to cause trouble and it brings to light maybe some Captain Rogers/Danny history too, for some GREAT Jealous!Steve McGarrett who is also very possessive of Danny and had some boyhood dreams crushed because his old childhood hero SLEPT WITH HIS DANNO! And he’s gotta prove to be the better Steve so there’s also a competitive Steve story plot in there. 

---

This year my goal is to wrap up my WIPs so I’m just gonna get these ideas out of my head somewhat/somehow  xD maybe i’ll come back to them next year 

[0fallen0]

Omg is that lapis lazuli

Anyways sorry I haven't posted much art I haven't been feeling up to it lately 😭

[thechildbesuffering]

steven and nezha - have a flower motif

- graceful kinda

- both don’t want to be seen as children (or more specifically, who they were) - some other third thing

[championdaigo]

🚨 NEWS NEWS NEWS 🚨

STEVEN STONE IS COMING TO PALDEA BABEY

[hearts401]

I’m sooooo im soooo

[shieldofstars]

⭐

[tireddaisys]

That is liliac diamond she's basically the pink diamond, and then u got the pearl to be helpful, you got the ruby for defending and spinel for the entertainment

[i-like-peach]

fucking jesus shit on MY steven universe

propaganda at its highest level

[canmom]

Hello! I absolutely love your blog, everything from your festival recounts to animation analysis and programming (one of tumblr's recommended posts was the one where you made your own rasteriser, and I liked your attitude in what I've read so much that I'm gonna attempt to conquer my 3-year-long grudge against using opengl during college and do something similar now that I'm a bit older and have no deadlines :D).

But anyway, I have 2 questions (sorry if there's easily accessible answers, tumblr search is not helping): 1. During your animation nights, does the screen stay black while everyone watches their own video while you provide commentary? I haven't caught any yet but maybe someday! And 2. do you have any youtube channels or just one-off video essays that you like that also cover animation/directors? Or, even programming lol.

Sorry for the long ask have a nice day!

hiii! i'm very touched that you like my dorky eclectic blog <3

For the Animation Nights, I just stream the video over Twitch from local sources on my computer, typically by playing the video in mpv and recording it in OBS. This is obviously not ideal from a video quality perspective, but it's the easiest way to watch video in sync without making everyone download files in advance. Then we all chat in the Twitch chat box (in large part to crack stupid jokes, it's not that highbrow lmao). I've gotten away with it so far!

As for youtube channels, I can recommend...

anime production/history (i.e. sakuga fandom)

SteveM is likely the most sakuga-fan affiliated anituber. He makes long, well-researched and in-depth videos on anime history, usually themed around a particular director or studio.

Pyramid Inu might be my fave anituber - very thoughtful analysis of Gundam, obscure mecha anime and oldschool BL and similar topics. tremendously soothing voice too.

The Canipa Effect does excellent deep dives into the production of specific shows, both western and anime. I appreciate the respect he gives to the Korean animators of shows like AtlA in particular!

Sean Bires's 2013 presentation on sakuga is pretty foundational to this whole subcultural niche, and a great place to get an introduction to the major animator names to know and significant points in the history of anime. unfortunately a couple of the segments got slapped down by copyright but the rest holds up!

animation theory (for animators and aspirants)

I'm going to focus here on resources that are relevant to animation in general, and 2D animation. if I was going to list every Blender channel we'd be here all week :p

New Frame Plus is one of the best channels out there for game animation, describing in tightly edited videos how animation principles work in a game context and analysing the animation of various games. highly recommend

Videogame Animation Study is similar, examining the animation of specific games in detail

the 'twelve principles of animation' (defined by Disney's Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas) remain the standard approach to animation pedagogy; there are various videos on them, but Alan Becker (of Animator vs Animation) has quite a popular series. I haven't actually watched these but many people swear by them! Dermot O'Connor expands the list to 21. Note that some of the terminology can be a little inconsistent between different animators - c.f. 'secondary motion'...

Dong Chang is an animator at Studio NUT, who produces a lot of fantastic, succinct videos on standard techniques in the anime industry, timesheet notations, etc. etc. Studio Bulldog, a small anime studio, are a good complement; they focus more on douga than genga and are generally a bit more traditional.

programming

big topic here, I'm going to focus on game dev and tech art since that's my field. but also some general compsci stuff that's neat

SimonDev - graphics programmer with a bunch of AAA experience, fantastic explanations of advanced optimisations and some of the more counterintuitive aspects of rendering

Acerola - graphics programmer who makes very detailed guides to a variety of effects with a very rapid and funny 'guy that has seen monogatari' editing style. When he's good, he's really good. His video on water is probably the best one I've seen (though I can recommend a couple of others).

TodePond - the most charming, musical videos about recursion and cellular automata you've ever seen. less programming tutorial and more art in themselves.

Ben Eater - known for his breadboard computer series, a fantastic demonstration of how to go from logic gates up to the 6502 with actual hardware. worth watching just for how clean he puts the wires on his breadboards like goddamn man

Sebastian Lague, Useless Game Dev - both do 'coding adventure' style videos where they spend a few weeks on some project and then document it on Youtube, resulting in a huge library of videos about all sorts of fascinating techniques. great to dive into

Freya Holmér - creator of the 'shapes' library, makes videos on mathematical programming, with gorgeously animated vector graphics. Her video on splines is a particular treat.

There are definitely many more channels I can recommend on these subjects, but I'll need to dig into my history a bit - unfortunately I need to rush out right now, but hopefully that should be good to be getting going with!

[centrally-unplanned]

I was listening to this cast by The Weeb Crew, with SteveM as a guest, going through some other Evangelion video and dissecting the mythical memetic tropes it buys into. Which was a lot of fun, I recommend the cast, and the video they are critiquing is a bit of a grad-bag of zombie memes about Evangelion from the 2000's, which yeah have aged poorly.

One of the ones they get into is the idea that Evangelion's TV ending was "intensely unpopular", and Anno & crew were getting like bombarded with death threats and stuff. Which happened at some level sure, but certainly wasn't the median response. The video actually sites the "emails" shown on screen in End of Evangelion as evidence:

And like, bro those emails are fake! The staff wrote them for the movie, they didn't use real death threats or fan mail, that would be a huge legal liability. Not saying they are analytically useless or anything but, you know, you need to know that.

Anyway, SteveM mentions that of course there was pushback against Eva's ending, but actually the big wave wasn't interior to the fandom - instead it was sparked by Eva "going mainstream" discourse-wise. In particular a review essay by social critic Eiji Otuska (who is also a former lolicon creator ding ding ding) that was published after the finale aired sparked a widespread discussion in the media by other critics. He links to the essay in their discussion....except he doesn't. He thinks he did, and then when they look, its just someone else mentioning it in an article in 2003:

Bitter disputes broke out on online bulletin boards, with some critical of the producers for failing to provide a clear-cut end to the story, and others who praised the finish for being "typically Evangelion-like." But when commentator Eiji Otsuka sent a letter to the Yomiuri Shimbun, complaining about the end of the Evangelion series, the debate went nationwide. "The debate that erupted over the ending went way beyond our calculations," Gainax's Sato chuckles. "Anno probably knew what was going on. He realized that media other than anime had taken notice of Evangelion."

Which triggered in me the thought - why doesn't he have it? He references it in his own work after all. As you can guess, after some searching I am pretty sure I know why; no one has it. Its never been scanned or reprinted in an accessible format! It definitely is important in the history of Evangelion - I have seen this claim in other contexts, the essay that sparked a discourse, and you can find many works about Evangelion citing Otsuki (generally later works, like an article published in September of 1996 which you can buy) But what the article article said is only discernable via the clues dropped from second-hand accounts.

So can we find it?

First of all I need to figure out what is even being referenced. Searching through contemporary Japanese sources, I dug up an extremely handy find:

A somehow-still-existing 1997 fan page by a Japanese otaku (I'm giving you this stuff auto-translated btw, what would you do with a wall of kanji?) who extensively catalogued every media mention of Evangelion. I am sure they missed some, but they didn't miss a big one like the Otsuki letter - which we know from the above interview appeared in gigantic newspaper Yoimiuri Shimbun:

This gives us three candidates; given that we know it was written after the finale aired, and that was March 27th, 1996, our most likely candidate is the April 1st essay; I was able to find a secondary source mentioning the review was "immediately" after the finale, so I think that nails it.

Which alas does not bring up anything! Try as I might I cannot find any extant blog post, or scanned image, or long quoted form. But after trying the usual methods I did realize something - unlike my average document hunt, this is Yoimiuri Shimbum, a newspaper, a big newspaper. Which means they probably have their own archive, which I might be able to access. and low and behold, they do! And my university research services actually have an account!!

Incredibly blessed by this stroke of luck, I went digging for everything containing "Evangelion" and "Eiji Otsuka" in 1996, and found it:

And it's fucking blank. If the article is scanned or anything it will have that "Japanese Text" you see on the first result, or "Scanned Image" tag or something. I swear its like the only ones not scanned, all the random ads and list of best sellers are all there, but the entire cultural essays section is just an archival void. Shot in the skull right at the finish line.

Alas I am out of ideas of this one - its a newspaper, no one is selling this on Yahoo Auctions. Though hey, at least now we know the title:

"オウム」を超えるはずが... / It should surpass Aum...", 876 characters long.

"Aum" by the way is Aum Shinrikyo, the cult terrorist group that conducted the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack. Which you can imagine really took the chattering classes by storm; it was the culmination of a series of "extremist" actions that began in the 1980's that built up a narrative of societal decay and alarm. It really isn't surprising that Otsuka linked Evangelion to Aum Shinrikyo; the apocalyptic connections were obvious, there was even an episode of the show that had to be changed due to the attacks as the production team thought the events were too similar. And additionally, if this essay was gonna spark a "societal backlash", it has to say something controversial right? I have definitely seen other critics like Hiroki Azuma discussing Eva in relation to Aum as a "social phenomenon" - I am betting Otsuka is the source of that comparison being so ubiquitous.

From other sources like people on twitter and other articles, I can pick up a few other details on what it contained; apparently he referred to Evangelion's finale as a "self-help seminar" for otaku and lambasted the idea of airing one of those on TV. And from his other writings I think you can certainly piece it together - essentially seeing Evangelion's self-involvement and hyper-introspection as a product of the same societal malaise that birthed Aum Shinrikyo, while failing to deliver a solution that could "go beyond" that. Which, the shit you said about media in the 90's, I want a hit of what he's having! But while today its quite obvious that groups like Aum were, sure, saying something about society but turned out overwhelmingly to be fringe weirdos as opposed to canaries in the mental institute coal mine, at the time this was very much the zeitgeist.

Still, I don't really care all that much what it says - its an important artifact! It started the "Eva discourse boom" that broke out of otaku circles and launched Evangelion into a cross-societal phenomenon! We should have a record of it, it should be preserved. I will ruminate on it, and see if any other ideas pop up. And meanwhile if anyone out there happens to see what I missed definitely let me know.

[fanfictionfaberrycentral]

Supercorp First Kiss part IV

Perhaps The World Ends Here by Trash_PandaTO

First kiss by SteveM

Perhaps The World Ends Here by Trash_PandaTO

Perfect Mornings by elena_mars

Faith by Slayerkaro

[sidhion]

i need to go back and post stevem

i miss him sm i havent drawn him in days