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tapas-and-stuff-productions · 2 years

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The Deities Project: Part 3

An early notion for the Keys & Kingdoms universe was to divide its world into sections ruled by three pantheons, and those would be the historical pantheons of Greek, Norse, and Egyptian mythology! As it turned out, the 3rd Edition D&D supplement “Deities & Demigods” included stats for those exact three pantheons, and I carefully studied that for guidance on how to reinterpret those legendary pantheons for use in a fantasy world.

And so began this project: drawing all 53 historical deities depicted in that book. Casey Gosselin drew their symbols and Stacy Lord drew the characters themselves. Neither saw the illustrations in the D&D book, but we stuck to what the book claimed as their symbol, their sacred weapon, and very general appearance. The big project lasted from October 2019 to August 2020. Since then, we’ve been putting more research into the real myths and other gods, but these will still form the foundation for the core members of the pantheons and what they’ll look like when the K&K universe begins.

This is an 11-part series presenting all the art anew and talking about the ideas behind it! Presented in the order in which they were done, which is approximately in the order of strongest to weakest according to their rankings in the D&D book. Don’t forget to check out Stacy and Casey’s own pages:

The final deity to qualify as a “greater god” - Loki, god of lovable rogues! Lots to discuss about the dude. Definitely off to a great start, but he ought to be flashier! I liked him having kind of a devilish beard and mustache; I’d go into a more cartoonish direction, kind of a Snidely Whiplash mustache with big curls… but at the same time, I hope he can be really dashing and sexy… if that’s possible. He’ll need a good face! We’ll start with this one. His eyes are dark, that was important to me. And I think the flame imagery on his robe should be more prominent! And he’s got a bit of a turtleneck, I think that’s pretty cool.

Here’s an amusing note I’ve just remembered: Stacy just so happened to draw roughly a quarter of the deities with their weapons in their left hand, and I’ve decided to canonically make all of those deities left-handed. I think that array works really well: some of them are sinister, some of them are quirky and creative, some of them are people who just happen to be left-handed. It’s nice! Did something similar with one particular storyboard frame from “The Choices”; I forget which members of the main cast became left-handed then, but it’s written down somewhere. We’ll, eh, do our best.

As an afterthought, I’ve very recently discovered that modern fans have come to interpret Loki as genderfluid. Even the MCU’s Loki TV series got in on that last year - you know, Disney-brand LGBT representation, that being, bare minimum throwaway reference and then wanting a big-ass pat on the back for it. Anyway, I dig it, I’m gonna do that. I figure that, as even more of a shapeshifter than most gods, Loki transitions on a whim. I also reckon more of these deities need to be LGBT; I’ve thought of a few instances of it, but I think there ought to be a few more!

The most materially powerful of the so-called “intermediate gods” - most of them are intermediate. Let’s see, how did the book define that? Simply as having hundreds of thousands of specific worshipers, as opposed to the millions had by the greater gods. Sure, that works.

So, Ares. We’ll be seeing a bit more ethnic diversity going forward! As I said earlier, I want these deities to represent all humans, not just those from Greece and Egypt and Scandinavia. And here’s the first really notable instance of that, Ares is Asian. Even though both Zeus and Hera are white. Gods can look like whoever they want! And, this didn’t really come out with what I had in mind. I was picturing a huge beefy guy, and a bit darker in complexion. A Benedict Wong type, to be very specific. And all of his weaponry ought to be bigger and nastier! You know what I’ve seen numerous interpretations do, is make the plume on Ares’s helmet a zebra’s mane. That’s oddly specific, but kinda cool… might go with that instead of red. Sometimes! Gotta remember the gods don’t wear the same outfit all the time.

Casey counted Artemis among her favorite symbols - it’s pretty neat, very elaborate, the moon and the bow. The way Casey drew the moon in most of its appearances as a symbol, that’s definitely the place to begin in my ponderings of how to make the sky in the K&K universe look unique. Here’s a good follow-up to an earlier thought: Artemis is the goddess of single women, generally translated in modern times as representing virginal women and being one herself, but like many others, I feel like something got lost in translation and she is in fact meant to be depicted as a voracious lesbian. Hey, for most of history that was considered a “single” woman.

I expected a bit of backlash for making her Black… and topless… but no, the biggest concern people had was that she uses swords instead of a bow. She’s all about hunting, they said, shouldn’t she use a bow? Sure, if you want to do it the easy way.

As for what I thought would be the controversial elements… well, nothing to say about her race, save that I made her twin brother Apollo resemble her despite generally not caring about gods resembling their relatives; I figure pairs of twins like Artemis/Apollo and Frey/Freya are close enough to actively seek to resemble each other. And… okay, worth mentioning that I gave her blonde hair and green eyes - since designing her I read a tip that giving BIPOC characters visual traits generally exclusive to white people brings with it the suggestion that their magical qualities come with a degree of whiteness. Fair enough, that’s a trope to watch out for. Hopefully her distinctively Black hair texture makes up for it being blonde? We’ll see how things go when producing the real canon with a team and stuff.

And, yes, she’s one of four goddesses in the collection who were drawn topless. New territory for Stacy, so, to avoid discomfort, I didn’t push against it when she drew female nipples looking exactly the same as the male, as simple discs. I did finally discuss that with her in designing the cast of “The Choices”, and she pointed out that nipples aren’t always erect so she’s not sure why they always are in art. That did throw me for a moment, but, I mean… I just don’t think these look quite right. So, one of a few bits of realism from Stacy we agreed to cut back on for style.

Heimdall was made Black as well. Because Idris Elba. I mean… come on. Do I really need a reason? Some have pointed out that Heimdall in the myths was once described as the palest of all the gods. Try to imagine how much I care. His eyes are orange for the same reason; I’m sure MCU Heimdall’s eyes are supposed to be yellow, not orange, but in most lighting, I felt they looked orange and I liked that, it's not a popular color. This is another pretty good design overall; most of his attire is purest gold, including the fur of his loincloth somehow, and feeling like we needed to introduce an interesting-looking sword at this point, his has no crossguard.

His symbol, of course, is his iconic war horn, Gjallarhorn. He probably ought to actually carry it around instead of just having it etched on his belt buckle. And… this one obviously came sometime before I said to Stacy, “You know, when the description says ‘beard’, that doesn’t automatically mean ‘beard but no mustache’…” Kept it on him, though, Heimdall pulled it off.

Tyr is very elaborate, I see. Stacy counted him among her favorites, said it was largely because of her success in drawing a bear head. For me, it’s the one piece in the collection that straight-up annoys me, I just didn’t have the courage to say that a bear’s-head hood generally isn’t the entire head, just the upper jaw, and that that’s not what I meant by a braided mustache. Eh, c’est la vie, I’m better these days at making corrections when I need to, to make the product perfect, I know now that that sort of thing doesn’t hurt the artists’ feelings, they want the product to be perfect too.

Other than that, you know, not bad. Got a cap over his missing hand after Fenrir bit it off. I wonder where that’ll ultimately fit into the timeline in this universe…?

Incidentally, I’m also not a fan of how Stacy draws boots with super baggy ankles, I had her quit doing that for “The Choices” and “Irregular Fantasy” - I mean, I’m not here to gripe about Stacy, she’s a fabulous artist and her general style is the very lifeblood of the team. Just… discussing evolution, I suppose.

#TAPAS and Stuff Productions #Keys & Kingdoms #The Deities Project

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stopeatingwhales · 3 years

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football hysteria x damon albarn

I LOVED THIS SM LMAO !!!!!!!! football obsessed damon is so cute

Pairing: 90s damon albarn x reader

Warnings: noneeee

Word count: 2.281

Requested by anon <3

༉‧₊˚✧

"Who you supporting?" Graham asked me, handing me a beer as he sat himself beside me on the couch next to me in the middle, Damon sat on the opposing side. Damon had dragged me over to Graham's house to watch the Man City and Chelsea game tonight, and knowing just how competitive Damon came to football, I knew it was better that I simply went along with things rather than moan about how much I really didn't want to spend two hours watching two teams pass around a ball for entertainment.

"Erm, Man City." I replied, quickly flicking the can open to taste the bittersweet barley flavouring of the heineken beer as it embellished the walls of my mouth.

"You don't support Chelsea?" Damon questioned, his eyebrows furrowed.

A small chuckle left my mouth. “Of course I don't, they're shit." I sneered, aware of the havoc that my statement was going to cause. Immediately, Damon's mouth fell agape; stunned by my malevolence, as well as partial shock from the new-found information surrounding my opinions on football.

Graham's laughter rang through the room and my ears as my eyes continued to burn into Damon's piercing gaze, him just as amused as I was. Nobody was as big a football fan as Damon had become. "They're anything but shit," he continued, eyebrows now raised as he scoffed. "You're telling me that you support Man City? Gallagher-brother-Man-City?"

"Okay I'm going to sit between you both,'' Graham announced, swiftly standing up, shoving my body to the side he had just accompanied, placing his body between me and Damon, a blockade to prevent either of us going at each other's throats. "Just so we can all be alive by the end of it."

“Well I wouldn't have fucking invited her over if I knew she supported those manic twats, Graham."

"Piss right off Damon, we're in Graham's flat, not yours." I bit back, completely unphased by his childlike behaviour. It had been made quite apparent to the media that Chelsea were indeed the band dominated by the south, as well as Blur, and Man City were celebrated in the north by Oasis. However, it was quite comical noticing the immediate flush of anger that filled Damon's face after my sly comment. Leaning back into the loveseat, my back adorned the soft feel of the cushion behind me. "Graham, who do you support?" I asked, curiosity laced in my words as the football pitch came into view on the television screen - initiating the beginning of the match.

My eyes were focused on Graham as I watched him toss his glasses onto the coffee table in front of us, which had been cascading with countless bags of crisps and other treats to keep us stuffed as the ninety-minute match played through. "In all honesty, I'm not that phased with football," he began, reaching over to open a bag of crisps. "It's Damon here who's completely obsessed with it."

As the match began, tensions were already built to a high degree between the three of us. Small but meaningless comments had been thrown into the atmosphere of the apartment, merely portraying our silliness and how neither of us had seemingly outgrown the competitive side of our personalities, something that would be more apparent during teenage years. Unfortunately however, very early into the game, Damon's supporting team had decided to skillfully snatch the ball from one of the players, eventually managing to get it into the goal - portraying the first goal scored subsequent to the game's start.

Damon instantaneously rose at the goal, shouting loud enough for the neighbours to hear every single word that rumbled out of his throat. "Told you we were bett-" he said, smugness intertwined between his words so effortlessly, though shamefully his words had been cut off by the sound of the cushion, once placed behind me, now hitting his face. I couldn't help but allow a tiny smirk to illustrate itself on my facial features as I admired his face dripping in absolute bewilderment towards my actions. “What the fuck was that for?” he scoffed, falling back into his side of the sofa, as I sustained the grin on my face, watching him. The atmosphere that was once overflowing with hostility was now completely serenaded with Damon's egocentric giggles, forcing my body to hunch into a sulk at how quickly my team had been warranting for a loss so early into the match.

Mid-way through the game, Graham had decided to go to the corner shop by his apartment to get more beers for us to share, due to us having run out to share between the three of us. I dreaded being alone in the room with the game ongoing with Damon present, full-well knowing that his upbeat jolliness would attempt to torment me upon the fact that he was winning, which, to my demise, was exactly what had occured. The air fell still in the room once the sound of the door slamming etched through the flat walls, my gaze focused entirely on the match following on the screen, attempting to focus my mind on anything but the room that I was currently occupied in - though my peripheral noticed Damon's head almost instantly turned to look in my direction once it was made evident that Graham wasn’t inside the flat anymore. As if reading my mind, he decided to shift his body weight, which was once adorned to the other armrest of the burgundy couch, right next to me, where he attempted to wrap his arm around my shoulders, warming me into an embrace. In spite of this, I could feel his intense stare on my features. Using all my strength to avoid connecting eyes with him, I wasn’t going to admit defeat so easily, my stubbornness proving a point.

Once Damon realised, he carried on watching the game, however his body had continued it's embrace with mine. At one point, I was thinking that the match was going to be a lost cause from the performance shown by Chelsea, However, things began to turn around, and Man City managed to score a goal, to Damon's consternation. The sudden win resulted in me lunging from my seat, swiftly detaching myself from Damon, my whole body cheering towards the goal as it replayed on the screen. What was amusing was that, after I had finished my applause, I noticed that Damon had moved back into his seat by the side of the couch, distancing himself from me. "Aw, you don't want to sit with me anymore?" I sarcastically questioned, not waiting for an answer as a small smile crept on my lips. It was very amusing, pissing Damon off. I must say, watching his ego deflate into nothing but a simple sulk at the corner of a room was really the sight.

"What did I miss?" The sound of graham's voice sounded through the room, paired with the clank of multiple beer bottles as he reached into the plastic carrier bag to place them on the table. Each and every one had an individual water-streak pattern, indicating that they had just been chilled - when they taste best.

"Man City scored!" I exclaimed, reaching out for one of the glass bottles as I got the bottle opener to unfasten it from its metal clasp, promptly taking a swig from the beverage. The intent was, of course, to provide Graham with the extra knowledge upon the events that occurred during the match whilst he was absent, however knowing myself, I had also wanted to remind Damon of said occurrences, to surge him to the edge of his frustration. Exclaiming it at the top of my lungs held just enough power to do just that.

A chuckle immediately left Graham's mouth from my enthusiasm. "Need me to sit between you both again?" He jokingly asked, yet an element of seriousness was laced between his words.

“Depends if Damon's gonna stop sulking or not.” I replied, focusing my view on the game playing on the screen.

"You're the one who was fucking throwing the cushions!" Damon shouted, reaching over to grab himself a beer.

"Because you were pissing me off!" I answered, shifting my gaze onto Damon, who was, to my surprise, staring directly at me. There was a certain look of annoyance glazed on his features, though the agitation seemed to subside as soon as we locked stares, as if he was longing for my eyes to bear their sight toward him, as if it was an examination, an analysation to confirm whether we were still on good terms or not; of course we were, while conflicting preferences drew evident tears between us during that moment in particular. After a few seconds had passed, Damon leaned back into the cushion, carrying on watching the game unfold, satisfied with his response from my eyes. Switching my gaze over to Graham, I took notice of a look of question illustrated on his features, to which I decided to mime that it was alright, in order to move myself next to Damon once again. It would've been a lie, and a mere understatement, to say that I hadn't missed his arms around me.

Bunching up next to him, enough space was made to allow graham to sit himself down next to me, though that thought was the last passing my mind; my body was shivering from nervousness, the close proximity between us, regardless of our romantic acquaintance, never failed to bloom butterflies at the pit of my stomach. Due to my body's weight pressing down onto the cushion next to him, it was obvious that he was aware that I moved to sit next to him - but at a cause of his stubbornness, him averting all his attention onto me, admiring me as if I was the only living being in the apartment, a home that hadn't even belonged to me, would never happen - it would take much more to result in his feign of irritation to melt away. Placing my arm around his shoulder, I granted my hand to reach up to his beautiful head of hair, my fingers caressing his strands gently as I brushed any parts that were sticking out on the sides of his head. His arms were wrapped around one another, like a child encompassed in an angry stupor at their parent due to them not allowing them a packet of sweets from the grocery store, though I was playing at his heartstrings, aware of just how much he adored me playing with his dirty blonde locks.

For a short sum of time, we both sat there, my hands never halting their actions. The next few minutes of the game played out of continuous dribbling and passing to other teammates, oftentimes resulting in the other team taking hold of the ball and running around with it for a while until their attempt to score. Randomly, Damon's arm had released itself from its shared embrace with the other, engulfing my body with his as he encased his left arm around my shoulders. We were in a sense of comfort with one another, though from Damon's avoidance of my stare it was made obvious that he was still in the least carrying a small element of annoyance, nevertheless, as I allowed my eyes to linger onto his delicate, paradisiacal features, holding back a grin was seen much easier said than done, a small curvature sneaking itself on his lips.

"Look who's won." Graham mumbled, his voice detaching me out of my trance that I was enamoured in.

A laugh rang itself out of my throat as I admired the lengthy team cheering as they enveloped one another in a massive embrace. "Told you they were better!" I grinned as I diverted my gaze onto Damon, the same look of frustration painted on his demeanour, still avoiding his eyes on me. "You want a kiss?" I asked, tilting my head in order to make sure I was the main thing in his sight, knowing he wouldn't be able to keep up his facade so easily. "Kiss kiss?"

I continued until his eyes met mine. It was as if, for a short segment of time we were frozen in place, momentary seconds passing of us merely marvelling at the view illustrated forth one another, my hands snaking their way around his neck as I leaned in slightly, noticing his blue orbs fall onto my lips, his teeth sinking into his bottom lip as his mind wandered through fields of appraisal. It was then where I couldn’t hold resistance for any longer, and I doubted that Damon could, bringing my head forward as I let my lips latch onto his, allowing time to flow as they lingered still before he kissed me back with gentle force, enough to notify me of his desire that encompassed him just as much as me. The kiss held innocence, portrayed adoration in its true beauty, nevertheless, also embodying eagerness, a yearning of lust.

"I'm going to be honest," I mumbled, removing my lips away from his, panting as I attempted to recollect my breath. "I don't actually support Man City."

"Of course you fucking don't." Damon laughed, our lips connecting once again as he perched his head forward, intoxicating me with the very thing that I desired most in that significant moment.

"If you're gonna shag, please go home." Graham groaned, causing our bodies to jolt at the sudden awareness that we weren’t alone together. Pulling away instantly, a wave of embarrassment covered my cheeks as we looked at one another, infatuation the single thing flowing out of our eyes.

“Sorry Graham.”

#i loved this so much please #damon albarn x reader #damon albarn #90s #blur band #britpop #graham coxon #imagines #band imagines

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stina-is-a-punk-rocker · 3 years

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jacqueline wilson’s ‘love lessons’

tw: abuse, pedophilia, characters making Bad Decisions, long unnecessary spiel about my childhood like I’m running a recipe blog

It’s funny how loads of the authors who helped shaped me into the vaguely humanoid being I am today have names beginning with the letter ‘J’; Judy Blume, Jeff Kinney, John Green, J.K. Rowling (yikes, I know) … and Jacqueline Wilson.

I’ve never owned a Jacqueline Wilson book of my own; they were always borrowed from a friend, or from a friend of a friend, or from a friend of a cousin- you get the gist. Her books, for me, come with an entire aesthetic: something reminiscent of yard sales, and reading under the covers with a flashlight, and being lulled into a false sense of security by the deceptively innocent Nick Sharratt illustration on the cover until someone’s best friend gets mowed over.

So I knew what I was getting into when I picked up Love Lessons. I knew this was going to be Fucked Up; and boy, was I right.

(Here’s the part where I warn you about spoilers.)

From an abusive dad to creepy child predator teachers to slut-shaming and victim blaming, this book has it all.

The main character is Prudence ‘Prue’ King, who is homeschooled at the beginning of the book, along with her sister, Grace. Their parents remain rooted in the early twentieth century, and are very strict about- well, everything. No TV, no computers, not a single mobile phone in the house; their clothing worse than the orphans’ from Annie; and their father remains distinctly distrustful of modern institutions like the school and the hospital; and so on, and so forth.

Daddy King suffers a stroke, and has to be taken to the hospital. Meanwhile, Mrs. King (a floppy, spineless woman who lives in fear and awe of her, frankly horrid, husband) sends the girls to school, behind the then invalid Mr. King’s back. Cue Prue and Grace being the freakshows of the school, with their strange clothing and overbearing mother.

Grace manages to make friends, but Prue remains alone. The kids are dicks, the teachers are dicks… well, all of them but one. And that’s the art teacher, Mr. Raxberry (I just couldn’t get over that name; it seems like something you’d name a mythical plant from Pixie Hollow or some shit. I’m assuming it isn’t an actual name, since the spelling & grammar check on my computer doesn’t seem to recognize it), or Rax, as he’s called.

Oh, yeah; Prudence’s favorite subject in school is art, and she’s a whiz at it. This is relevant, because reasons.

And here’s where stuff gets murky. Prue develops a crush on Rax- which is perfectly normal. I’m definitely no stranger to it; I’ve had crushes on my teachers, my mum admitted she used to think one of her professors was cute. And yeah, as I grew older, I grew out of those crushes and now have a markedly more refined taste in men (unless he’s 5’ 7’’, born in ’97 and named Bang Chan, I don’t want him); and my mum married my dad, so I’m assuming she did, too. Admittedly, now that my dad teaches at a university, it’s icky to think that there might be students who have crushes on him- but I digress.

My point is, loads of us have liked our teachers. But I doubt the majority of us have acted on it.

And Prue actively showing her interest in Rax isn’t the worst part. That’s a spot reserved for Rax reciprocating her feelings.

Guess Ezra Fitz and Ms. Grundy (yes, I watched Riverdale; please don’t cancel me) have a new addition to the Creep Club.

The age of consent in the UK is 16, if I’m not mistaken. Prue is 14. She’s just barely become a teenager, and she’s being preyed upon.

Because that is what Rax is. He’s a predator; he preys upon this vulnerable girl who’s never been in a relationship before- hell, she’s never even had friends- her father’s abusive, so she obviously doesn’t have the best experience when it comes to men- she’s unpopular at school, with the students and staff alike- and he lures her in. I don’t care how bloody nice he is to Sarah, or what a good dad he is (well, he’s really not, seeing as he cheated on the mother of his children WITH A BLOODY FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD CHILD)- the guy’s a fucking pedophile.

I was staunchly stuck at a yellow light with him; like, sure, maybe Prue thinks he’s flirting with her- maybe she’s looking at this all wrong, she doesn’t know how relationships work- see, he drew a picture of Sarah, too, in his secret notebook- Prue’s just reading into this too much- up until he says he loves her.

Dude. Humbert fucking Humbert. She’s fourteen, for Christ’s sake, and you’re married. You have two children. She’s a child. She’s probably closer to your son’s age than she is to yours.

(This is the part where I bury my head in my pillow. And scream. Extensively, and with passion.)

The book does make some genuinely good commentary on slut-shaming and victim blaming and abusive parenting. And on one hand, I can see why so many people find issue with the romanticization of the when I kissed the teacher trope- but I can defend it, too.

The book is in Prue’s perspective. She thinks she’s in love with Rax, so obviously, she’s not going to throw in some valuable moral at the end- because she’s too young and inexperienced to think otherwise. And sadly, there are loads of instances of child abuse that go unreported because the victims just don’t know better.

What I have issue with is how the school dealt with it, ultimately. Prudence, a child, has to deal with the consequences of the actions of a literal child predator. Sure, Rax ‘clears his name’ by cooking up some bullshit story about how it was only a crush and he didn’t encourage it, but you’d think other adults would know better and, oh, I dunno- dig deeper into it, instead of blaming it on a child?

“She says you told Mr. Raxberry you loved him and he held you in his arms and fondled you.”

Which Prudence denies, because, again, she doesn’t know better. She then goes on to say that they did nothing wrong. To which the adult speaking to her, in this case, the principal, Miss Wilmott, goes on to say:

“I’m not sure that’s entirely true… I feel that there are some aspects of your friendship that could be considered inappropriate.”

FYI, lady, he kissed her- multiple times (not that kissing her once makes him any more redeemable), and told her he loved her, and admitted to fantasizing about running away with her and leaving his family behind. Fun fact: do you know Prudence is underage?

You’d think that Miss Wilmott would maybe give this whole fiasco a favorable ending, but it turns out she listens to school gossip;

“I haven’t been at all happy with your attitude. You don’t seem to understand how to behave in school. I’ve heard tales of unsuitable underwear and then a silly romance with one of the boys in your class. I feel that in the space of a few short weeks you’ve made rather a bad name for yourself… I don’t know whether you intend to be deliberately insolent but you certainly come across as an unpleasantly opinionated and arrogant girl… I can’t help feeling that you’ll be much better off elsewhere. I shall try hard to engineer a suitable transfer to another school.”

And then she comes out with this gem:

“If you won’t leave, then I shall have to ensure that Mr. Raxberry finds another position.”

“No, you can’t do that! He’s a brilliant teacher.”

“You should have thought of that before you started acting in this ridiculous and precocious manner. If I were another kind of headteacher, I would have Mr. Raxberry instantly suspended. There could even be a court case. He would not only lose his job, he could find himself in very serious trouble. Did you ever stop to think about that?”

Girlboss, gaslight and gatekeep. The fucking trifecta.

Also, by ‘another kind of headteacher’, does she mean the kind of headteacher WHO DOESN’T LET CHILD PREDATORS ROAM FREELY WITHIN THEIR HALLS?

This bitch is out here blaming a child, a literal child, for the crimes of an adult man.

The only time Prue seems aware of the fact that Mr. Raxberry is actually a very shit person is her immediate thoughts that follow after she tells Miss Wilmott she’ll take the fall;

I so wanted to save darling Rax- and yet why hadn’t he wanted to save me? Had he told Miss Wilmott it was all my fault, that I’d got a ridiculous crush on him, that I’d made ludicrous advances to him? … I wanted to tell this horrible, patronizing woman how hungrily he’d kissed me, but I couldn’t do it. I loved him. I had to help him.

NO, SWEETHEART; YOU MOST DEFINITELY DO NOT.

And maybe I’m going overboard with all these excerpts, but here’s what Rax has to tell Prue, after school, following her expulsion:

“I let her think the worst of you, the best of me, just to save my skin. I said it was ridiculous talking about a love affair between us. I said you simply had a crush on me, and that I was just trying to be kind… You were brave enough to stand up to me and force me to acknowledge the truth… I love you… That’s why I had to take a risk and see you this one last time. I didn’t want you to think I didn’t care… Every night when I close my eyes, I’ll think of us together in this car and how badly I wanted to drive off with you. I’ll imagine us walking hand in hand at the water’s edge… I wish I wasn’t such a coward.”

(I burrow into the pillow further. I’m trying to suffocate myself.)

And that’s where I think Wilson went wrong. Sure, Prudence getting expelled for something that was completely out of her hands is unfair, and horrible, but it’s real. That shit can happen.

What’s bad is showing Rax in a positive light after all that. If only Wilson had written Rax to not be the Romeo he thinks he is. Make him ignore Prudence, throw her under the bus in front of her face, instead of this star-crossed lovers bullshit it’s made out to be. Show your younger audience that Rax is not a good man. I’ve got a little over two weeks left for my twentieth; I can see why this is unacceptable. But I was a little younger than Prue when I watched Pretty Little Liars, and my only gripe with Aria dating Ezra was that Noel Kahn was so much cuter.

It shows when you scroll down the Goodreads reviews; you’ve got adults giving it one or two stars, and teenagers giving it four or five, with their biggest complaints being, “but Toby was cuter!!!”

Other non-pedophilia related complaints regarding the book include: Prudence being unlikable- which I didn’t really notice, considering she reacted to some people way better than I would’ve, even at 19 (which probably says a lot more about me than it does about Prue, but oh well). Still, Prudence obviously isn’t the most prudent of people- and again, she’s fourteen. Look me in eye and tell me you weren’t an arsehole at that age (unless you’re fourteen now, in which case, I assure you that you’ll look back on yourself someday and go ‘wtf was I thinking’). Bringing up Toby’s dyslexia in an argument was low, though.

There were people who thought the Kings’ almost-Amish lifestyle was exaggerated and unrealistic, but I assure you, it may very well be real. There are 8 billion people on the world- it’s fair to assume that several of them are complete weirdos.

Grace was a sweet character, and I adored her with every fiber of my being. As were her friends Iggy and Figgy. Honestly, I would’ve loved a book about Iggy, Figgy and Piggy’s (mis)adventures too.

#love lessons #jacqueline wilson #teacher #teacher crush #teacher x student #anti ezria #ezria #pretty little liars #aria montgomery #ezra fitz #when i kissed the teacher #book review #books

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inkylegacy · 2 years

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Eyo pinned post

heyy so i was thinking and wow this blog has been around for... nearly three years? whack

so a lot of the people following me probably have no idea that “Inky Legacy” is in fact a whole au i’ve been working on all those years! (i dont blame you, i p much dipped for half that time and only posted small bits so far)

so here’s a quick explanation what Inky Legacy is all about:

Inky Legacy was originally just an interpretation of canon events I came up with after chapter 5 was released, with an attempt to turn a bunch of theories and speculations into some kind of coherent narrative

at some point between the books getting released and me getting a little carried away with said narrative i just accepted its a canon-adjacent AU

the story i’ve come up with for it is split into five acts plus the.... not quite spin-off, definitely not a sequel, however Sad, Lonely and Bad at Math (SLABAM for short) can be defined, which has a blog for it over here

there’s a masterpost here but tumblr kept breaking the links so i’m also making a new better masterpost on carrd over here

the acts of the story are split not by length but by whatever made the most sense to me narratively so don’t be fooled by the fact that there’s five, act 1 is about as long as the other four combined

i’ve finally figured out a way to work around my adhd and with how much progress i’ve made on writing the script for this just in the last month im tentatively gonna say the first comic should be ready for posting around the beginning of next year?

also i’m gonna do quick summaries of the acts under a cut to give a better overview of the actual stories without making this too long lmao:

Act 1 (Schere Stein Papier): From the early days of the studio to its closure, this act explores how everything spiralled. Mainly how Joey Drew spiralled tbh about 30-40% done with scripting?

Act 2 (Another One Bites the Dust): Yeah the song reference kinda tells you everything. Main focus is Henry returning to the studio 30 years and how he got trapped in the loops, with a few side stories about some of the other characters’ fates ~50% done scripting

Act 3 (The End): The shortest chapter of them all. The End of several things, including the loops

100% done scripting, 100% done storyboarding

Act 4 (The Beginning): How those still trapped in the studio deal with the end of the loops, and where everything goes from there idk like 20% scripted

Act 5 (Legacy): Something something how the actions of the parents condemn the child, aka just because the loops are over doesnt mean we’re done with cycles of abuse yet, aka i asked myself what the hell is supposed to happen after chapter 5 of batim ended Like That (aka the grand conclusion of the whole story or at least most of it) 50% scripted probably?

SLABAM: Purely written format with occasional illustrations, written by me and @ichaisme. There’s a separate tumblr to post the chapters just to keep things orderly at @sad-lonely-and-bad-at-math. Starts of the same as act 1 of Inky Legacy, but then instead explores how things could have gone had Joey chosen to actually try and be a good boss. More canon to IL than that makes it sound, but how the two stories tie together is a spoiler for both hard to tell a percentage bc on one hand the first few chapters are published and we have a general plan and several outlines, on the other hand i still have to read tiol to figure out the timeline more

and thats it thats my 1am attempt at explaining this

#batim #inky legacy au #if theres questions i cry happy tears over getting asks #also if my secret satan sees this: hi half my reason for making this was not hopelessly confusing u

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bosses-stay-flawless · 3 years

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As more souls awaken, more souls are remembering their star ancestory and their star relations. Buried deep within the sacred stories, art, music and beliefs of early indigenous people from all over the world, similar information has been passed down throughout generations.

Many souls just like myself, have begun to research into their ancestory on this planet, in this incarnation on earth, only to find an open window to the stars.

My own personal star seed journey and knowledge of self began when I was 5, looking and pointing to a place in the sky, calling that place home. Knowing without knowing how or why I knew that.

I would literally climb out of my bedroom window to be closer and somehow aligned with that place I could feel in my heart.

Long before DNA tests connecting me to various tribes/ people who felt the same, or before ever hearing the term star seed, I considered myself as such.

Some wait for some form of disclosure as a form of confirmation, where as many others already know, who they are, and where they originate.

I used to think of Planet Earth as being separate from the solar system. A place far removed from the rest of the galaxy. They more I research and learn the more I discover a much broader perspective, the earth is very much apart of the Milky Way Galaxy, as such we are citizens of the galaxy.

Last night, while looking up at the beautiful night sky, I asked myself why do we view everything not known to us as being alien, when our fellow galactic beings would probably view us as close or distant relations that are part of the same galaxy & universe?

I know, I think too much, and much too deeply. 😀

In honor of my ancestors, great & small,known & unknown, from the earth & from the stars.

In the earliest written records of ancient Ireland, one follows history all the way back to the mention of the Thuatha de Danu: The Tribe of the Goddess Danu. No one knows who they really were, or where they came from, only that they descended on Ireland in a mist. It’s still debated whether they were gods or aliens. Irish literature mentions they “came in from the sky on flying ships’. These flying ships are depicted on ancient rock art dotting Ireland’s landscape.

The Dogon in West Africa are another people who remember coming from the stars. The Dogon are considered a “primitive” group of people living in Mali, West Africa. Anthropologist Marcel Griaule studied the Dogon for almost twenty years, speaking often with a blind wise man named Ogotemmêli. The Dogon preserve a tradition of contact with intelligent extraterrestrial beings from the Sirius star system. Ogotemmêli drew the anthropologist a star map of Sirius illustrating the orbit of Sirius B, a companion star to Sirius A that had only been discovered in 1844 and that is not visible with the naked eye. According to Ogotemmêli this was lore that stretched back generations for the Dogon.

Mayan, Hopi, Tibetan and other indigenous cultures also speak of extraterrestrial contact. A unifying “Sky Elder” theme is found in almost every Native American culture.

We are not alone here, in this galaxy. We are made of stardust, supernovas exploded, living in an expanding universe! Many are remembering and waking up to their galactic origins. The Hopi predicted that this would happen. That, during the shifting of the worlds, the Rainbow Tribe would begin to wake up and remember their origins and their mission.

We are here to remember that we are all divine, borne of stars, with souls that are eternal. The EarthWalk is an exercise in alchemy; a chance for our souls to grow. To break free from the Matrix, the illusion. To be consciousness pirates, reality gypsies, and cosmic surfers.

Starseeds are here to start a revolution in consciousness, to create love, peace, joy, and encourage consciousness freedom.

Many ancient prophecies have predicted theses times. The Hopi named it the Great Purification. Cherokee called it the rise of the Rainbow Warriors. The Mayan calendar predicted a massive shift, an “end of an old world”. As humanity stands at the crossroads between the Fifth and the Sixth Worlds, our consciousness is evolving due to the cosmic changes; we’re ‘leveling up’ into these higher dimensions, becoming galactic citizens. Those in the higher dimensions, those in the stars, are waiting for us with arms open, to remember our cosmic consciousness.

The possibilities are endless, there are no limits. Peace, love, and freedom are our cosmic birthright.

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holycow99 · 3 years

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石田お寿司 18/9/21 stream summary Part 3

This is not the full translation of the stream. I only translated the parts I could understand & interpret or parts I found interesting/important. I’m still a beginner in Japanese, so the translations may not be accurate. If you want to repost, please repost at your own risk.

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(t/n: ** = translation may not be accurate, SY= Y****, TS= S******)

83. Ishida bad mouthed the assistant guy from the last stream, not realising that person was in the stream as well. He then asked whether the guy was able to wake up.

84. Someone mentioned Bleach’s author, Kubo sensei, as the one who could draw super fast. He said that being able to draw fast didn’t only include the pace you’re drawing the picture. The panels were also included. Even if you draw fast, if there’s 120 panels, it’d still gonna take time. On the other hand, if there’s only 70 panels, it’d take less time. Then there’s the art style as well. Those who use great amount of Kakeami would take a longer time. He then praised Kubo sensei’s drawing.

(t/n: Kakeami is a method of shading using only parallel lines.)

85. Takahashi Rumiko sensei, the author of Inuyasha was also mentioned as mangaka who drew fast. Ishida mentioned that she’s full of energy. He said young Takahashi Rumiko sensei was cute. She’s still cute now.

86. SY asked what kind of vehicle he wanted to ride. He said he’s scared of trucks. He also didn’t like riding buses. In conclusion, he didn’t wanna ride anything.

87. Ishida said it’s kinda hard to be motivated with digital drawing. He did want to draw on papers, but drawing digitally is infinitely better when he wants to fix or adjust things in his works. He often uses shortcuts as well.

88. He never really felt any sense of accomplishment, so he didn’t understand people who did. He did feel relief (?) when he completed something, but he didn’t understand the feeling of wanting to experience that sense of accomplishment again. He envied those who felt that way since he never felt it.

89. SY read TG manga for the first time the previous day. Ishida was surprised by it and asked him if he thought Ishida was just a streamer. People in the chat were also shocked by it, lol. There were people who only knew about JJ too. Ishida wondered how did SY come across his streams. Sy replied that he just thought Ishida was just someone who drew beautiful illustrations the first time he watched his stream. Ishida was grateful that he’s reading it. It didn’t really matter if he read it or not. When musicians told him that they read TG, he felt like they’re just trying to be considerate, but they probably did read it. It’s okay if they didn’t read it. He always thought that every time he met new people. He wasn’t being humble, it’s just that he preferred if people could just talk to him as usual.

90. Someone said that there were people who got shocked reading TG after they played JJ. He said it’s because JJ was a combination between his sister & him. He also already through with TG, so the vibe was different. However, he once said in an interview that it was hard for him to get rid off TG vibes inside of him when doing JJ in the early stages. He was teased about that by everyone.

91. He went to the bathroom for the 3rd time and someone guessed the correct flower.

92. He wants to invite Mr. Kunimitsu and Ms. Towada again.

93. He said 30,000 is quite a lot for a small fry youtuber like him. He’s amazed he could come this far just by his Animal Rap videos and his game streams.

94. He’s looking at the new illustration that Ms. Towada posted on her twitter. He said the illustration must’ve taken a lot of time. That kind of illustration was tough to draw. He said Ms. Towada seemed healthy when they talked recently.

95. It’s better to just have a conversation with Ms. Towada the next time she’s in the stream since he’d get distracted.

96. Takayuki Kondo, Takashina Sarafumi’s VA was streaming at the time and a fan commented that he was praising Ishida in the stream. Ishida wanted to know what he said about him so he asked the fan to record it.** Ishida was grateful about it.

97. A fan commented that Ms. Towada seemed knowledgeable about geography or local stuffs. Ishida told them it’s because she really liked to travel. She probably had gone to most prefectures in Japan. That’s why she’s very knowledgeable in local history.

98. He jokingly said that he already went to Kumamoto trip with 300 fans. He apologised to those who didn’t get invited.

99. SY commented something and Ishida asked him shouldn’t he be doing something at the moment. He hoped SY did something while listening to his stream. He wanted to think the viewers did that since he only talked about trivial stuffs.

100. A lot of people said they weren’t invited. Ishida said that the trip was only for old men. The trip was for those aged 40 years old and above.

101. He mentioned that he’s just gonna thank the viewers for 30,000 subscribers’ celebration, though he’s really grateful for it. He wanna aim for 40,000 as well.

102. Someone mentioned that Simon’s abilities were really cool to the point they wanted to try those abilities. Ishida also stated he wanted to try them.

103. A fan suggested Ishida going on a trip with 300 gals. He said it seemed tiring, but in actuality, he’d probably enjoy it.

104. A fan asked his opinion on anti-natalism. He wasn’t familiar with the term and searched for it. He wondered if the term was brought by Schopenhauer. He said Schopenhauer was just jealous of Hegel since Hegel was really famous. His books were full of criticism on Hegel.

(t/n: Anti-natalism is a principle that’s against reproduction. Anti-natalists believe that giving birth is wrong. Both Schopenhauer & Hegel were philosophers.)

105. His opinion on the subject was that it’s okay if anti-natalists exist. There are people who agree or disagree with the concept. If you don’t wanna have a baby, you don’t need to. If you want to have a baby, then you should go for it. He said recently, he finally understood why declining birth rate is a bad thing.

106. A fan suggested a stream where viewers could also participate to increase subscribers, so he asked what should they do together. People in the chat suggested games like tetris, bomberman, and Smash Bros. He didn’t wanna play Smash Bros cus he didn’t wanna get beaten again.

107. A fan said that a lot of people would be interested in having children if they had money. He said it’s better to provide support towards people who raise children.

108. Mashima Hiro sensei, Fairy Tail’s author, did an online signing session. He wondered how he did that.

109. A fan suggested playing Mario Kart with viewers, but he scared the same thing would happen to him, just like during Smash Bros.

*Ishida reading game recommendations.

101. A fan asked what kind of game should they play so he wouldn’t get his ass beaten. He said it depended on the players. It’s better to gather weak players, so he could be the strongest.

102. A fan suggested a correction session, where Ishida would look through everyone’s own manga and correct errors. But then, everyone had to draw a manga.

103. He’s still not over his Crazy Jump’s idea. He seriously wanted to publish the magazine, lol.

104. People asking him how many pages should they draw and he said just 2 panels.

105. He bought a lot of books about human history.

106. He drank a lot of proteins.

107. He said Hitman is fun if he plays it by himself. He becomes lazy when he streams it, so it feels boring.

108. He wanted to play Detroit again, but he wanted to finish Heavy Rain first. He wanted to play Heavy Rain but the game’s heavy.

109. He wanted to end the stream, but everyone asked him not to.

110. He’s probably gonna do his work or watch movies while trying to sleep after the stream ends.

111. He wanted to end the stream, but he’s really curious about Mama’s last illustration, so he continued playing Made in Wario for a bit. He fanboyed over Mama, Mona, and Penny. He wanted to get penny’s illustration, but he didn’t have enough money to buy items to increase Penny’s level.

112. He wanted to try go to a cabaret club. He wanted to try spending all his money on a cabaret girl. He wanted to go to a host club as well, but he thought he’d probably wasting the hosts’ time since they’d have to serve him.

113. In the end, he’s gonna take a look at Mama’s final illustration by himself. He fanboyed over her one last time.

Part 1

#ishida sui #tokyo ghoul #jack jeanne #chojin x #choujin x #ishida sushi stream summary

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nightswithkookmin · 3 years

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JIKOOK BE CONCEPT- EXTENDED ANALYSIS

ANON: Hey Goldy, so I want to ask, what makes you look at one moment and decide the tension in there is nothing but then in another moment you claim Jikook are having issues? I ask because of the conclusions you drew on the photoshoot video when you said they were fighting but in two other instances where we can all clearly see that the mood between Jikook is tense like Jimin's mood in the Be Concept Clip and the other interview you have said it's nothing. I don't mean this in a disrespectful way, I just want to understand your thought process if you can walk me through it. It's ok if you don't respond. I love your posts regardless. Keep it up.

Thanks for your question.

I think I try my best as much as possible to share my thought process on why I reach certain conclusions and in instances where I do not have much time to delve deeper into a conversation I state an NB indicating I would be talking further about that particular topic later on?

I think the first thing I can point out to you right off the bat in regards to your question is that we may most likely be having different understandings of tension as pertains to shipping simply because we ship Jikook in different ways.

Again, I do not mean to say my perspective is superior or that someone else's is inferior. I'm just saying we may be having different views on the topic based on the differences in our shipping styles.

To me tension is not just a sense or feeling or mood. It is one of the metrics I employ in assessing whether or not a ship is real- stay with me.

In my experience, while people may be good at hiding a relationship, they can never hide the intimacy of the relationship or the stress of keeping that relationship a secret. Secrets are stressful to keep and they leave stress trails in their wake. It's as simple as that. If any ship is real in BTS you will see its stress marks.

It's not easy standing there, watching your man's nipples being played with, or having another man grope your intimate partner for entertainment purposes while you stand there smiling for the cameras- you can smile, but it's going to be fake.

It's not easy hearing how your man sneaks into another man's shower to watch him bathe and compliment the size of his dick.

It's not easy hearing how you can't stand next to your man in a line up while another person takes that position even if it's just for work.

It's not easy pretending not to love your man, while watching everyone else love on him. It's not easy being told what you can do and not do with your partner much less by your own peers.

It's not easy hiding your love and affection for the person you love, holding yourself back from kissing them, or hugging them or doing any of the intimate stuff you are so used to doing with them- not when you have to be around them all the time.

It's not easy having cameras shoved in your face during your alone, private time with your man, when you are watching them on giant screens and they are right there next to you but you can't hold them- please listen to JK's demo Delcacomania which he released on his birthday last year and you will understand why he cried when JM flew from Paris to see him on his birthday. I cried too.

My point is, it's really not easy keeping a relationship a secret within the same work space as your partner. It's not as easy as other shippers make it seem. That shit is stressful and stress begets tensions and tensions begets conflicts- especially if there are other people attached to the parties in the relationship.

A secret gets heavy before it gets easy but you can never erase the stress that comes with hiding that secret especially not in a group as diverse in personalities as BTS. There are bound to be clashes, there are bound to be slip ups- moments where the fourth wall is breached and many others.

Stress is usually one of the first indicators of people keeping anything a secret. I've been called toxic for this, but I pay a lot of attention to conflicts and tensions within the group dynamics regardless of the degree of that tension because that conflict to me is a sign of stress.

I can tell you for a fact, any ship that is kumbaya in BTS is not real. Any ship whose existence doesn't stress out the group dynamics is a ship made in Disney heading for Never-land. Conflict and tension is a sign of stress and stress is a sign of keeping secrets.

That's not to say every single tension within the group, between Jikook or any other ship is as a result of them keeping that ship a secret. I think we can rule out all forms of contrived tensions at this point- you know which ones I'm talking about. Ain't no damn person up in there tryna steal nobody's man in BTS. The fuck?! Lmho.

Then there are those tensions that are as a result of mood swings, bad hair days, a call being delayed, a missed period- what? some of them have girlfriends, cough cough. Yea, Don't mind me.

Tension could be caused by anything really and so I think it's not enough to point out tensions but you have to try and ascertain the cause and effect of that tension to see if that tension is as a result of the stress that comes with keeping Jikook a secret or whether it is rather causing stress or going to cause a stress in their relationship dynamics-

C'mon, now y'all know if Jimin should thirst over another man that that is going cause a lot of stress not just for JK but the group as well because Jikook's mood affects them too.

Jimlous and Jeonlous are also signs of the stress that comes with keeping Jikook's relationship a secret. Let's be honest, if they were out all of those wouldn't be happening. People wouldn't cross their boundaries as much as they do.

From my perspective, both of Jikook are constantly reacting, poorly might I add, to their relationship being a secret. It seems to me they both hate what they have to do to keep eachother a secret within the group.

Jimin keeps JK a secret by acting as if he is available and JK keeps Jimin a secret by acting as if he doesn't want him- cold, nonchalant, and the way I see them I think it drives them both crazy. Lol.

Jimin doesn't want to come out but he doesn't want to be kept a secret either. He just wants to be in that glass closet whereas JK seems to want to be out or completely hidden- he is not about that middle ground life, I feel. But that doesn't mean he doesn't make compromises especially where Jm is concerned.

Jimin is very conscious and highly judgmental of himself and I think he projects a bit of that into their relationship dynamics. As such he is constantly worrying about feedback, about how their relationship is affecting the group's dynamics.

You see this in the way he runs to JK upon the least complaints by any member about JK. Like when Jin complained about JK not choosing his bag over JM's, or when RM complained about JK buying a birthday present for only JM and not the others.

Or when RM complained about JK showing a song he had written to JM first before showing it to him in a VLive- now they didn't mention who they were talking about exactly but I knew from the moment JM started reciting Jikook's go to response for whenever they are called out for constantly being together, the whole 'we just so happened to be together in that moment,' that they were talking about JK. I don't know, I could be wrong.

JM is constantly trying to mitigate Jungkook's tendencies for exclusivity in their relationship especially where it conflicts with the groups interest even though that exclusivity and preferential treatment feeds directly into his love language.

It's that kumbaya in him I keep talking about. He would sacrifice their happiness for the groups. In my opinion.

But JK aint about that life. His entire philosophy is to pursue personal happiness first. So often, you would see him weaponizing their relationship secret against JM- trying to out him and shit. which in turn, ends up causing their relationship a ton of stress.

The best illustration I can give for this is when JK posted Ending Scene in early parts of 2019 and people started speculating Jikook had broken up because it was a break up song. JM immediately responded to that post with two posts, one about the Calico cat or something and the other pointing out how that song was just a cover. Jimin hates it when JK does something to create the impression that they are not together especially when they are together.

But at the same time, he would take a step back from their relationship, ask for space to try and nurture his other relationships with friends and family when he feels JK coming on too strong on him- like Jimin what do you actually want! You drive me nuts!

What I'm trying to say is that when you point out that JM looks tensed, you should be able to explain why you think he looks tensed.

And if you think his tension goes to the root of their relationship, then you should be able to predict the consequences of that tension too. Lol.

For me, I filter their tensions through their established patterns of behavior, their personalities and the actions that arise from their personalities- listen, the Maknae line can be very melancholic for no reason sometimes. Not sure what goes on but boy can they brood!

You have to consider all these things.

Tensions are obvious, obviously. Or maybe not. Most of them are quite easy to spot. Some not so much. They do go undetected if you are not hyper focused on them in certain moments when they happen or aren't aware of the context or subtext behind such moments.

Perspective is everything. We all don't have the same perspective. But no one holds the truth when it comes to Jikook. We can only speculate in a way that holds meaning to us.

Take for example Jimin and Jin's call during Jimin's VLive in March this year. There are a fraction of shippers who do not believe that that call was intercepted by JK at all simply because they do not see the subtext of that moment. Why would JK do that and not just reveal his identity, they ask. A valid point.

Then there are those who see JK interrupting that call as plausible because they believe they can differentiate between JK and Jin's call voice. Equally valid point.

Then there's me, who think yes that was JK's voice but goes further to try and anwer the questions raised by the first group as that, JK was pushing the boundaries both with JM and Bighit for barring him from doing a live with JM.

As such, I believe that call was an act of rebellion on his part to be allowed to Jikook with his man on the VApp. All that protest would then lead to a pivotal moment of him and JM having their VLive but under heavy surveillance. Lol.

Actions have consequences whether good or bad. Whether positive or negative. It's the cause and effect principle. Every effect has a predictable cause and every action has a specific and predictable effect.

If a moment of tension is created between them that is substantial, it is going to produce a subsequent substantial reaction. Law of Newton- I can't make this shit up. Lmho.

Another moment of this nature for me would be the VMin's unit interview filmed in February/March and released in June during Festa.

Now, if you were following the tensions between V and JK around that period, the context and subtext of that Interview would be easily apparent to you- V was just shading JK left right left. Bless him.

All that random flirting with Jimin- JM lost his Mochi cheeks, his pinky has grown were just code for JM is a grown ass man now so stop being possessive over him.

I have said Jikook have been asserting themselves against eachother this year following the lows of late 2019 and especially around that time period.

For Jimin, that self assertion takes the form of checking JK's over possessiveness over him as that is a huge cause of tensions within the group throughout the years and something that I feel really bothered JM in the later half of 2019 and early half of 2020.

Why does it bother him when he used to be the one enabling that shit in JK? The members, keep up. Lol but not just the members. Remember I said earlier how, Jikook had come under heavy scrutiny with May 2019 to June this year. JM I feel wanted to keep things really on the low but JK- sigh.

Believe it or not, JK dumb whipped ass exposes Jikook more than JM does in their relationship. In the very least his possessiveness and chest puffing when anyone breathes near JM is one of the biggest tells.

We all know Tae is one of the members that have openly pointed out his displeasure with JK keeping JM to himself, cutting him off from his friends and all. Now we all know also that Jimin's pinky is a huge deal to JK. The moment he saw VMin comparing pinkies that's when he began screwing with us for real! Lmho.

JK made a big deal about JM's pinky and also seemed to have a thing for JM's Mochi cheeks too, calling him his Mochi and shit right in front of Tae's salad. Listen, TAE KNOWS. He knows!

So I found it interesting, how those parts of JM were specifically the things that V felt had changed about Jimin- I mean go back and look at Tae's facial expressions and smirk when he started talking about that. Lmho.

Then Jimin clapped back with that whole pinky line from their song Friends, pointing out how contradictory Tae was being. Lol.

To me that has always been one aspect of Tae and JK's ship dynamics that I enjoy so much. Tae is constantly teasing and shading JK and it's so subtle yet passive aggressive sometimes. you might miss it if you don't understand the context of him saying certain things in certain moments.

He don't spare JM sometimes either. Chileee. You never know with this man. Lol.

I mean did y'all catch his jab at JK during Festa when JK brought up the rain fight and he said, yea but that was a long time ago though- give it a rest. When I tell you, this man knew JK was trying to one up him over the whole dumpling fight thingy he had with JM. Lmho.

Then in that dynamite MV reaction VLive when JK and JM tried to eye fuck through the viewfinder? Let's not look into the camera he says so eloquently then side eyes JK- I LOVE THIS MAN!!! Please stay on their necks for me. They play too much! Lmho.

JK's possessiveness over JM is one of the causes of tension within the group I feel and JK have said his hyungs try to teach him not to be so possessive. Tae, RM and Suga to me are those hyungs who keep him in check the most, most times.

All that being said, just because there is tension present between them in a given moment doesn't necessarily mean it's as a result of a conflict between them as I have explained in past posts.

The inverse of this is similarly true. Truth is we can never know these things for sure. We can only speculate.

And personally, as I keep pointing out I have my own metrics for assessing these kinds of things. I get it wrong sometimes and when I do, I simply adjust my metrics and keep it pushing.

It's my own customized metrics, the lens through which I filter their interactions and make sense of their moments and It works for me. Isn't that what having an opinion is about?

I find, some of their interactions or moments follow an established pattern of behavior from their past moments and so it's much easier to call those.

For instance, you don't need a six foot page analysis to identify Jimlous or Jeonlous when you see it. You don't need a crystal ball to tell you when JK nibbles on Jimin's ear that Jimin is nervous. They did that in 2018, they did that in 2019, they've done that in 2020- to me that's become a pattern and when I see JK anywhere near Jimin's ear depending on the setting I will conclude JM is nervous and JK is trying to comfort him.

All that would be left for me to determine then is why Jimin is nervous at all in that moment and if I find he has no reason to be nervous in that instant my next assumption then would be that Jeon Jungkook is horny. I'm not kidding. Jk scares me. Lol.

Don't mind me.

He could be horny or he could be touchy, or he could be just expressing his affections through skinship. All of that is valid so I would employ an elimination approach?

I would rule out Jikook sexual foreplay in instances like that based on whether or not JK's gesture was a mission given to him by the staff based on Jimin's reaction to that gesture- He seemed pretty disappointed when he learned that JK bopping his nose was just a mission.

At times too I test out theories.

Yes, Jimin is an extrovert but does he freeze out JK when he is being an extrovert? He doesn't. We have seen him grabbing the Jeon titties in behind the scenes photoshoot, we have seen JK shove his butt in JM's dick face, we have seen 50 shades of JK grab JM's neck and dip his hand down his neck into his chest region to warm himself up. We have seen Jikook at behind the scenes photo shoots countless times. They gravitate towards eachother.

So if he is being his extrovert self with every body but JK, and JK is orbiting him but not interacting with him as they have done in the past then honestly I don't need my crystal ball to assume something is up between them. Why? Because Jikook's interactions behind the scenes aren't susceptible to false conditionings as compared to the intentional, exaggerated versions of their interactions on camera which sometimes can be laced with fanservice.

Jikook is not fanservice. Most of their behind cameras are moments of them breaching the forth wall. Like JM walking into JK's room without noticing there were cameras in the room. Their mood in there was not a performance and wasn't intended for the cameras and yet they were still close. Them taking a picture at the back of the track was equally that- unintended for the cameras.

What I'm saying is, we have seen Jikook when they are working on camera and when they are not working on camera and that mood in that behind the scenes photoshoot video doesn't fit either description of Jikook in those settings to me regardless of whether I know them personally or not.

What that moment fits into for me is a pattern of behavior that has been consistent with Jikook over the years. And I know people box JM into this whole extrovert personality but as I've said I don't believe anyone is completely extroverted or introverted.

JM to me has a certain degree of introvertedness in him and I've talked about this. He seems to have a bit of an avoidant personality too where he recoils into himself or shut people out in certain moments like how he says he drinks alone and becomes much quieter when he feels stressed out.

He doesn't open up as much about his problems it seems, he bottles it all up untill it eats him up- I'm glad he says when gets like that JK notices his mood and often comes around to do something that makes him laugh. Jimin does same for JK when he is feeling anxious- Please, Jikook is real ok?

So stop telling lies. Lol.

I think this avoidant personality becomes more prominent in moments when he fights or argues with people.

In Manila it was that moment where he noticed JK staring at him and so be moved his seat back to avoid JK's gaze. In VMin dumpling fight, it was him going out to drink with Suga after the fight- classic avoidant behavior. In Yoonmin it was him asking Suga not to touch him when Suga put his hand on his back even though Suga was sat right next to him.

In 2017- was it the behind scenes photoshoot for the billiard pool games? We saw JM literally running away from JK. Lol. He literally side-eyed the fuck out of JK, yeeted himself away from JK the moment he finished posing for the cameras. In that OT7 footage where V was playing with JK's hair, again, he yeeted himself out of there real quick at the end of filming- dude literally said deuces bitches. Lol.

And in the Jin birthday VLive 2019, he pulled away instinctively when JK's knee touched his. In all these instances, JM was keeping up the facade. Smiling and interacting like his normal slytherin/ honorary hufflepuff self but his instinctual reactions is what gave him away. In my opinion.

To me that is a pattern of behavior on JM's part. When he is angry or mad st someone- he avoids them. And it's harder if he has to be within the same space with such person.... I'll circle back to this.

All the times since 2015 when he's been 'mad' at JK he's done just that- Akekeking with everyone else, amplifying his extrovertedness, latching on to his 'clutches' within the group, all the while keeping JK at bay while stealing glances at him to see his reaction at the same time.

And when he notices how that's affecting JK- he literally smirks in satisfaction. Meet evil chim everyone- And I say this with love, he is vindictive as fuck. I mean this is the same person who didnt hesitate to kill Army in a game just for disobeying him- allegedly. Same person who said he would whoop his bandmates except of course for JK and force them to bow at his feet if he was ruler. Did y'all see Tae turning to check JM's reaction when JK made fun of his singing in run? Did you see his passive aggressive reaction to JK after that clowning?

Listen, we all should be scared of Park Jimin. He is sweet and all but fuck with him... I dare you. PJMs are gonna revoke my PJM membership are they not? Oh God! Lol

JK is similar to JM in this regard. He avoids when he is angry or edgy. Try touching him in that state and he is pulling away. He did it with Tae in the Dynamite MV behind scenes where Tae tried to touch him and he pulled away and the whole not wanting to hold hands with Tae at the KBS interview thingy- it actually broke my heart watching that bit. JK. Sigh. Will post and delete the Taekook video I am talking about as soon as I post this- out of respect for their shippers.

JK does the same to JM too sometimes when JM irritates him. Manila and also around On promo when they had that Alex Almanto whatever unit shoot- they were all having fun, there's a cut and suddenly he is pulling away when JM holds him, does the lip thingy, and glares at JM. He turns away to look at Hobi, which I just think he was trying to hide his expression from the camera lol- JM almost burst out into laughter and I nearly peed myself watching that bit- JK can be very petty sometimes. Lmho

He did the same in this controversial photoshoot. He was mad at both JM and Namjoon which explains the part he was dragging his feet when he was walking away from JM. It wasn't because he was waiting for Jimin. He was avoiding Namjoon who was walking ahead of him. In my opinion. And the part he stood with Jin and RM- JM did something hilarious JK giggled a little but turned immediately to Namjoon and when he noticed RM laughing too he stopped laughing. Then he did that thing were he put the fear of God in RM when RM stood close to JM. JK was so angry he forgot his manners when he bumped into Jin in that moment and again, like always. He looked away to avoid the scenery.

Now I don't know what had gone on there but I'm still trying to reconstruct that moment to figure it out. All I know is something went on involving those three and may be Tae too as I have pointed out in previous posts.

JM was mad at JK, JK was mildly mad at JM but heavily mad at RM.

All these things I've mentioned are patterns of behavior that have repeated over the years from my delusional point of view of Jikook's interactions and of their interactions as against the group dynamics.

Circling back to the Be concept clip and JM's mood in there, I gotta ask. Do you think Jimin's mood was as a result of the stress of keeping their relationship a secret in that moment?

It wasn't to me. Even after looking away from JK he went back to looking at JK again. When their eyes met he smiled a little. Whatever was going on with him had nothing to do with JK or their relationship. If it did, he would have been much more hostile than that and frankly JK wouldn't be sat there cheesing the way he was doing in that instance. His butt would have been on fire.

JM seemed- serene and peaceful to me. I actually enjoy him most in his moments of quiet like these.

RM's reaction to that Jikook moment however is an indication of stress to me. He seemed excited, probably wanted to play with his Jiminie but when he noticed JM had looked away his instincts was to check JK's reaction. Not anybody else, JK.

When he noticed JK was smiling at JM he dropped his hands and seemed a bit deflated. That deflation right there is one of the signs of the stress I'm talking about.

RM isn't just the leader he is their friend. Like V his bond with JM suffers from time to time due to our elephant in the room. I am often fascinated by RM and JM's friendship dynamics and would definitely love to have conversation about their dynamics.

I hope this answers your question?

Please keep supporting Jikook. Jikool is real.

Signed,

GOLDY

#jikook #jikook analysis #kookmin analysis #jikooktheories #kookmintheories #jikook scenarios #Goldy #goldy blogs #goldy ananlysis #goldy theories #jikook fights #bts ships #jikook is real #jikook are in love #jikook ship

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getacluedrew · 3 years

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Nancy Drew book collecting

The Orange Silhouettes

There are LOTS of Nancy Drew books. Since being published in April of 1930 there have been many versions, rewrites, updates and new mysteries which are still ongoing today in some way! So the question is, “Where to start?!” This is less like book collecting and more akin to comic collecting. Which series? What dates matter? Are some rarer than others? Fear not sleuth! I’ll try and help you out. It’s less a question of “true value” and more the value to you. So start there. What sort books are you wanting to collect.

This post will focus on the Classic Orange Silhouette

This first 23 books in the original series were published in this form, from 1932-1946, and are what many would probably consider one of the “classic” versions of the set. (The other being the iconic Yellow from the 60′s).

When we hear “Vintage” or “Antique” Nancy Drew books, this is often the cover that comes to your mind. Baring the iconic silhouette we have come to know and love today. They often have a blue board with the orange debossed writing or just printed onto the cover.

These books range over a decade of publishing and have several versions, however all of them bare the 25 chapters and have not yet received their rewrites. They also have 4 glossy or printed illustrations on the inside.

Blue covers can be a bit misleading since they have a large breath of time to cut through. So what’s the deal? How do you know which goes with which set? Truthfully they all go together. But let me explain the differences in an example here. Different size, color, printing, paper and debossing. Both of these are in the same collection however the one on the Right is a “War Time” book printed during WW2, where as the left is a 1932 printing. War time Editions were forced to change their printing size, paper, and even the type of board they used. More on wartime editions later. (click here for more info on War time books ) So that is something to bare in mind when looking for the blue books. While they may appear different it just means that version was printed during the cut backs of WW2.

Most Orange Silhouettes will have an orange or black inside cover like this one above. Their Dust Jackets have the iconic White cover and black text. The earlier editions of these books will not have the blue silhouette yet. Adds on the inside cover range form Dana Girls, to Nancy herself.

How to tell First Editions? Well as a quick tip, the first 7 books already had a first printing ( see here for more info on these versions) The first edition to come in this format starts with numb 8 “Nancy’s Mysterious letter”

Subsequently every other book up until 23 “The Tolling Bell” will have an orange format. So how to know? As I said this is over a decade worth or reprints. A simple trick. It’s not fool proof, but since MANY older Nancys have lost their Dust Jackets over the years there is a trick the casual collector looks for. The Book List.

Every Nancy Drew book display’s a list of other titles in the series some where, in the front, or back of the book. Check the list and look for the last title. If that tile matches the name of the cover it’s a safe bet you have an early printing of that book if not a first printing. Most Nancy Drew books display the original print date no matter the year that particular book was printed so sadly that can be VERY misleading. Subsequently you can use this trick to tell when your book was printed if it was a later version based on when the last title was first published.

Now a quick note to the cautious collector. In the early 2000′s Applewood released an anniversary edition of these books which replicate the originals. And to someone not knowing or looking they Will look very similar to the originals.

These are NOT 1930 or 40′s editions. But are collectable none the less! (more on these in a later Post) However people claim they are old versions when they are 1991 through 2005. So how do you know? Check the spine and check the inside. Old 1930/40s Nancy’s will say “Gorsset & Dunlap” where as the Applewood will say “Applewood Books”. If you are unsure ask the seller to show you the inside cover or the dust Jacket spine. Most also have a seal on the front cover and a Barcode on the back. BUT if you want the classic snazzy look for not as much money try out the Applewood editions.

(same advice goes for you Hardy Boy’s collectors too)

So if you are someone who loves the classic Nancy Drew look, wants to have a decent sized collection or aesthetically pleasing set of books, loves a good treasure hunt, likes 30′s and 40′s vintage, and doesn’t mind a bit of digging or paying a bit of money. Then you should defiantly look into collecting the Orange Silhouettes.

(There also their sister version the Black Silhouettes version but those are for later)

If you want to learn more and get into collecting further I highly recommend looking at the Farah’s Guide for more information or check out, nancydrewsleuth.com.

check out other related posts bellow.

Pt 1 “Firsts”

Happy Hunting!!! 🔍📚

#Nancy Drew #books #book #collecting #antique #cluecrew #clue crew #getacluedrew

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rodpupo2 · 3 years

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Research: Project Finish

Tim Sale

Tim Sale is a famous comic book artist, who had worked in several titles along with the writer Jeff Loeb, including Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, Daredevil, and many others.

Tim Sale was born in may of 1956, in New York, where he studied visual arts, spent a good time of his life in Seattle, and today he lives in California.

For some years he drew his art privately, only to please himself. When he found himself working at a fast food in his late twenties, however, he decided to try to sell some of his work. This led to an association with Thives’ World Graphics, a fantasy anthology series, where he illustrated stories.

What most marks his work is the dramatic aspect that he manages to obtain in the characterization of his characters and in the scenarios he creates, making the stories unique and immortalizing the characters.

The union of Sale’s art with Loeb’s engaging narrative has become the perfect marriage for mysterious plots.

One of the most striking characters worked by Sale was Batman, which he drew “The Long Halloween”, “Dark Victory” and “Halloween”. He was able to fully transfigure the dark aura of Gotham and his Dark Knight. He also worked with Superman in the saga “ Superman for All Seasons”.

Both of The Long Halloween and For All Seasons are what is known as “Year one” comics. These works take their heroes back in time to their earliest days of crime fighters.

His main tool is watercolor, which he uses with mastery. Sale's palette of colors is something really impressive, always drawing and painting his characters very delicately, and calmly. His style is very cartoonish, although this does not diminish his art in any way, on the contrary, his style is very unique and characteristic.

Pedro Franz

Is a Brazilian comic book artist, who was born in Santa Catarina and has a degree in design.

He has been publishing several comic books and participating in exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. As an illustrator, he has published works several magazines and books, and regularly collaborates with the Piauí magazine. As a graphic designer, he is a contributor to the Par (Ent) Esis platform. He has comics translated and published in English and Spanish, and has good international recognition, thanks to his publications.

But what is most impressive in Pedro's art, perhaps is his intensive use of colors. Mixing various shades of different colors, mixing different compositions. In addition to sometimes using characters from pop culture, with his elaborate style.

Despite liking traditional comics, he has always published and worked for national publishers, often with authorial works.

Perhaps his best known work, which was even published in the United States is the comic “Suburbia”.

Suburbia tells the story of Conceição, a girls daughter of enslaved rural workers, who flees to Rio de Janeiro in the early 1990s. In the city, Conceição begins to work as a cleaner and to get involved in the world of funk, slums and poverty.

His drawings are extremely surreal, not exactly following a traditional way of making comics, with several images spread across the page, with different shapes and sizes, with extremely strong colors, mainly valuing blue, purple, yellow and red, as his main colors.

Richard Corben

Richard Corben was one of the contributors of elevating the comics to the category of Art, and of its unparalleled style of great influence among many current artists.

Richard Vance Corben was born in Missouri, United States on October 1940, in a family of farmers in the middle west ( where he started reading comics), and lived in Kansas City. There he studied Fine Arts, got married, had a girl and started working in local cinematography animation company. At the same time, he started to create and publish some underground fanzines. From the begging it was clear that he was interested in science fiction, eroticism, and total rejection of institutions ( the Army, the Church, etc), mixed with a lot of humor.

At a young age, Corben was an aficionado of bodybuilding, just like everyone who was interested in a persons aesthetics. The first character that he created, was Rowlf, a dog who took on a human form. In the beginning of the 1970s he amplified his work ( and his fame) in some underground magazines. And in 1971 he started working for the Heavy Metal publisher where he created one of his most famous characters, Den a large muscular man, who was always naked, and always after some adventure.

Corben has a very particular style, with unsettling mixture of caricatured, often satirical grotesque and intense,convincing realism. Never before had such wildly cartoonish worlds proved so convincing.

Also he can handle an exponentially higher standard because of his ability to use colour to show the effect of light on whatever he’s depicting. The way that he mixes light and colors in certain panels to differentiate those elements from each other, is something to admire.

Corben worked in a few mainstream comics, he always preferred to work with authorial works or working in specific themes like fantasy and science fiction comics and not so much on superheroes.

But probably the most famous mainstream comic that ever worked was the character Hellboy, along with writer Mike Mignola.

Hellboy is a series of comics that has a lot of mysticism, Norse mythology, horror and monsters. Something Corben certainly agreed to do, without thinking twice.

Richard Corben is one of my favorite artists, with a style that is perhaps not as realistic as an Alex Ross for example, but the humor and beauty that he puts in his characters is very unique.

Corben died on December 2, 2020, leaving a great legacy, for the world of comics and arts, with a very unique style and extremely stunning worlds.

Charlie Allard

Charlie Adlard is a British comic book artist, who have worked on the comic industry for over 25 years. He spent the majority of his time since 2003 working in The Walking Dead along side with writer Robert Kirkman , until the last issue on 2019 He started reading comics when he was very young, and he said that he was very lucky to have influences of American comics and the more high art, such as Asterix and Tin Tin. He was fascinated by European comic books artists like Moebius, Alberto Uderzo and Herge. He started his career as many British artists and writers, working on 2000 AD, with characters such as Judge Dredd, Armitage and eventually Savage. In the United States he started working with the X Files, Astronauts in trouble, and of course The Walking Dead. Adlard started in The Walking Dead from issue 7, and brought a slightly different style, from the previous artist. Adlard's art is very cartoonish, but the universe of The Walking Dead still doesn't get silly because of it. Quite the opposite, the dirt and rot that Adlerd puts on his characters and the world, only sustains what a horrible world it is to live in. Many readers complain about Adlard's style, being very simple, that his characters are very similar, and sometimes it is difficult to identify them. But I believe that although his style does not vary much, when it comes time to show a horde of zombies, a devastated city, people feeling despair, and extremely disturbing scenes, Adlard manages to excel. Adlard's main tool is ink. All The Walking Dead magazines are in black and white, and he manages to give a lot of depth to the scenarios and characters using only a few ink stains. Today Adlard is doing some comics, mainly for DC, but says that he does not intend to work with Kirkman and zombies again, because he wants to explore other themes, and to innovate his drawing skills.

Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid was one of the most important and well known figures in contemporary architecture and design. With a singular trajectory, marked by a versatile, bold and out of the box style, she was the first woman to receive Pritzker Prize for architecture and was also the only female representative honored by the Royal Institute of British Architects with a golden medal. Zaha Hadid was born in Iraq, more precisely in the city of Halloween, in Bagdá, in the year 1950. Her family was of high class, her father being an important politician and her mother an artist. Still young, she traveled and studied in other places of the world, like London and Switzerland, but it was in her native land the she got her first formation, when she graduated in mathematics. At the age of 22, in 1972, she enrolled in one of the most famous independent schools of architecture in London, and there she gave the starting point to her career by studying and creating an important connection with the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, a figure that encouraged her and opened the doors for opportunities. Later in the 1980s, Zaha Hadid decided to open her own office. This, Zaha Hadid Architects was born, which made her name and talent recognized worldwide. Known for her works with futuristic lines, clean and pure forms, as well as the fragmentation of architectural design. Her projects and discussions raise issues that put architecture and its future to the test. This is because the architect seeks in her works to interrelate design, architecture and urbanism. I knew Hadid and some of her works, but it was the recommendation of my teacher Lauren, that I should look for this architect. As my project takes place in the future, she recommended that I look at some works by Zaha Hadid to get inspiration when creating the scenario for the comic. I find it very interesting how her works have this futuristic aesthetic , because it reminds me of science fiction films like Blade Runner with those skyscrapers and buildings with different shapes and sizes that are extremely imaginative that could only exist in films. With unique works and projects, famous for their exuberance, futuristic elements, curves, non linear shapes, distortions and fragmentations, Hadid inspired and generated fascination both for her constructions around the world.

Syd Mead

Syd Mead was a designer, best known for working on films such as Aliens, Blade Runner, Tron and Star trek. Mead was born in Minnesota, United States, on July of 1933, but five years later he moved to a second house in the western of United States prior to graduating from High School in Colorado in 1951. Some years later, he did the Art Center School in Los Angeles, where he graduated with great distinction in 1959. He was immediately recruited by the Ford Motor Company. At Ford he worked in the advanced styling department, creating futuristic concept car designs. But his imagination went beyond cars and he began to imagine clothes, helmets, buildings and scenery from hyper advanced civilization. After Ford, he also worked in other big companies like Chrysler, Sony and Phillips. After that he started migrating to the concept art world of movies. Mead is really important for generation of writers of science fiction, because many of them were influenced by Mead’s colorful paintings. Mead never wrote a novel or short story. He imagined the future in his mind and turned that imagination into illustrations. In 1979 he designed the extraterrestrial spaceship for the first film “Star Trek” in the cinema. Ridley Scott called Mead to design the buildings and flying cars of the futuristic Los Angeles “Blade Runner” in 1982. In 1986 he was hired to design the space station and vehicles of the movie Aliens directed by James Cameron. Almost at the same time, the designer created the electronic world of “Tron” for Disney studios. The same ones who hired him in 2014 to design the futuristic city of “Tomorrowland”. Mead died in 2019 after three years of lymphoma, he was 86 years old. He was a great influence for many designers and science fiction writers and illustrators, due for his creative worlds and automobiles , Elon Musk quotes Mead as one of his major influences, on visions of the automotive future and design in general.

Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson

Transmetropolitan is a comic written by the British writer Warren Ellis and the American illustrator Darick Robertson, published by the Vertigo label, and falls within the cyberpunk genre, and the problems that rampant technology will cause us.

Throughout the 60 issues of Transmetropolitan, Ellis and Robertson build a chaotic and brilliantly alive future, presenting a sci-fi society with a peculiar mix of elements of cyberpunk, political dystopias, bioengineering and transhumanism, sexuality, economics and much more.

In a dystopia, in a not so distant future, the journalist Spider Jerusalem is isolated for fiver years in a hut in the forest, but he has to return to the city to earn some money.

Throughout the comic, amid a nihilistic aura that humanity has no salvation, the author- Warren Ellis - criticizes the consumerism and futility. The illustrations, of Darick Robertson, is full of excesses as the environment should be, a brand of the style of the 1990s.

The search for the truth is the central theme of this work, and in the midst of all this we found ourselves in a investigative odyssey that involves the lowest scum of that society ( thieves, murderers and rapists) until reaches the highest of the scum ( the presidency).

This background allows the work to touch on the most profound social themes, and without fear of saying what needs to be criticized, this is where Transmetropolitan shines, and provoke deep reflections on issues such as racism, the influence of media, the power of religions, the education, and many other themes.

In short, Transmetropolitan dissects and criticizes everything, it points out the flaws, the lies and the hypocrisy of each one. It’s a study about the problems of democratic society in the 21th century.

Jon Mcnaught

Jon Mcnaught was born in 1985, London, England. He work with drawing comics, and work as an illustrator, printmaker and lecturer. After spending several years on the Falkland Islands during his childhood, which will inspire his second book, Pebble island. The book pass years after the war, where he tries to recreate his childhood, with aspects of his curiosity, when he was exploring abandon bunkers, where it was just part of landscape, or somewhere where he could play. His work has essentially been landscape print-making (often situated in the city), but with quite simple intention of capturing the sense of space, light, time etc. His work is mostly about that, places that he was interested in depicting, and trying to reproduce the visual. He want the characters to feel like elements of a landscape or an environment ( he preferes to focus more on the background, than the characters itself). But usually he uses figures and postures to suggest expressions rather than close ups showing facial features. What I like about Mcnaught's work is that they are simple designs, but the colors are very vivid. The way he constructs the scenarios is very invective, because it doesn’t need to be extremely detailed, he just needs a few lines to show what he is talking about.

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nanakah · 3 years

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producing fancontent is truly a bizarre endeavor

i'd been at least a good 3 years since i last seriously drew or wrote something other than my oc stuff (and i don't usually publish my stuff, last time I did it was probably my Watanuki illustration for his birthday like two years ago on twitter)

but somehow it's like, once you start your mind derails into several wips??? I had like 3 ishimiko fics in the works but now before actually getting the guts to publish any of those I got like a VISION for what I want their dance to be like and it suddenly overtook everything else in priority because like. I HAVE A MIGHTY NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENED LKAJSLKAJFS

i promise that if i do publish anything, that one will be the first. The others I'm still kinda "eh" about since the next few chapters could make or break the assumptions I made (one is white day-themed, another is kabedon themed LOL), but at least for the dance it's a nice departure point to involve my interpretations and my headcanons. And since we could either never see the flashback OR get something else entirely...it's my chance to run wild with it before the reality ends up influencing my take on it

asklajlfajflk

but i'll say. While I'll die on the hill that unfortunately the Ishimiko story arc is too complex and could have benefitted from being its own manga or changing some pacing issues (*mumble mumble* having Ishigami get over Tsubame as early as xmas and make the entire bad girl storyline happen earlier *mumble mumble*), the dance is like. THE MOMENT for a fix it doujin or something if ever needed.

and i'll say, it's the perfect opportunity to have a poignant thing with Ishi and Miko looking back on their history since middle school with the three dance moments kaguya establishes

1 - your first dance is for someone special (midddle school flashback, a more stiff dance as they're shy and full of regrets about the memories)

2 - it doesn't matter if you dance with other people halfway (e.g. make them dance with prez/chika and maki to symbolize the things they have gone through and their journey to eventually consider being together again)

3- your last dance is for someone special (they decide on their own to dance together again, and it's less stiff than the first dance. because instead of having kaguya gently push them, they seek it for themselves)

and also, it's the perfect starting point for them to have feelings for each other openly.

a confession would be too early, so would be dating. but it would be the PERFECT starting point for ishigami to stop being a thick headed dummy and start using his observational skills to finally think "holy crap, Iino might be into me", and then they go from there

his style is not to make it a huge game or take too long like prez (he has said before in his opinion love and confessions are a matter of speed and being there first, so if he falls in love he believes you should confess the sooner possible), but again, this opinion is also just because i have a mighty need to have them in a flirty/UST stage before moving things along

aaaaaaaaaaaa. i'm such a sap. being a Welcome to the Ballroom fan definitely helps.

#ishimiko #headcanon #headcanons #kaguya-sama #kaguya-sama spoilers #IF ANY OF THIS IS BEING OOC I DONT CARE #IF BEING SILLY IS THE ESSENCE OF ROMANCE THEN I'LL STAY A FOOL #IF IT'S TOO SHOUJO I DONT CARE I WANT IT #and IF AKA WON'T DO IT #I'LL DO IT MYSELF #if anyone wants to go down this rabbit hole as well i'll be sure to encourage u lol #chinatsu and tatara have a lot of moments that reminds me of ishimiko in ballroom lol

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current-mcr-news · 4 years

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Behind the Scenes: The Umbrella Academy - Episode 1

BRANDON JENKINS: In 1953, a 25 year old director named Phil Tucker had $16,000 and just four days to make his first sci-fi film. The plot? A creature comes to Earth with a death ray and wipes out all of humanity, except for eight people who are immune to the creature’s weapons. He called the film Robot Monster.

Movie clip: With the swiftness of a deadly cosmic ray, the Earth is inundated by indestructible moon monsters. Their ghastly mission? Death for all humans.

B: The film was so low budget, Tucker couldn’t even afford to get alien costumes, so he had the monster in a gorilla suit with a TV for a head.

Movie clip: What astounding technical developments are being made to protect mankind?

B: The release was a disaster. It was widely panned. Its lasting legacy would’ve been that it was one of the worst movies of all time. But in the early 2000s, a kid from New Jersey with a knack for drawing comics saw a picture of the Robot Monster and it stuck with him.

Gerard Way: I’ve never even actually seen the film, but I saw pictures of this creature over the years, and they’ve got a TV set, kind of circular space looking head, and they have a gorilla body, and I was like, “I want a superhero that’s kind of inspired by this.”

B: The kid’s name was Gerard. He’d been writing comics since he was 15 and was on his way to making it as a professional comic book artist.

WAY: I went to art school and I was an illustration and cartooning major, so comics were kind of like my major, and I was like this perpetual intern. I interned at DC, I pitched a cartoon to Cartoon Network, and then I landed a job as a toy designer at this place called FunHaus in Hoboken. But that’s like right when the band took off.

B: That band, Gerard’s side hustle, would become massive alt-punk sensation, My Chemical Romance. Seemingly overnight, My Chemical Romance and Gerard were making some of the most popular music in the world, getting spins on terrestrial radio, dominating music video countdowns, they were even nominated for a Grammy. But while he traveled across the globe leading a rockstar life, Gerard kept up with his first love - drawing.

WAY: So I really missed comics and we were in Japan and we did a signing at a shop, and one of the fans gave me a little marker set and it was Copic markers. They were like the greatest markers that I’d ever used before, and so I started to create Luther.

B: Luther, a superhero with a gorilla body and space helmet who lives on the moon was the very first character Gerard drew in what would become his hit comic The Umbrella Academy. I’m Branden Jenkins and this is Behind the Scenes: The Umbrella Academy. This season, we’re going backstage and inside the making of season 2. The first season of the show, based on Gerard’s comic of the same name, launched in February of last year and quickly became one of the most beloved series on Netflix. Now it’s back for its second season with bigger effects, bigger characters, and bigger drama. We’re going to catch you up on everything that’s gone down in The Umbrella Academy universe so far, and we’ll spend the next five episodes breaking down how the team shot the multi-million dollar superhero production across two countries, and how in the midst of a global pandemic, they managed to finish it from inside their own homes. But first, we wanted to take a look back and dig into the roots of The Umbrella Academy. So today, I’m catching up with the creators of the comic and the guy tasked with making the TV series. We talk about how the graphic novel was adapted for your screens.

B: Alright, so if you haven’t watched season 1, go back and watch season 1 on Netflix. For those of you who just need a quick recap: At 12pm on October 1, 1989, a supernatural event occurred. Forty-three babies across the planet were born to mothers who were not pregnant just seconds before. The world was confused, intrigued, and one eccentric billionaire wanted to find the babies and adopt them. He ended up with seven. Each baby had a superpower, and what do you do when you’re a billionaire with a group of kids with superpowers? You train them to become a crime fighting family.

Reginald: I give you the inaugural class of The Umbrella Academy!

B: When Gerard Way started creating the members of the Academy, he started with the most fundamental material.

WAY: I created a list of all the things that interested me. It could be anything from ouija board, fortune teller, spaceman, gorilla body, just a list of stuff.

B: Then he drew from that list and started creating these characters. All in all, he would draw seven. The first, Luther, the half-man half-gorilla, was the team’s defective leader. He was also the child closest with their father.

Luther: Just at Dad’s favorite spot. Allison: Dad had a favorite spot? Luther: Yeah, you know, under the oak tree. We used to sit out there all the time, none of you ever did that?

B: Next, he created Klaus and Allison, the boy who talks to the dead and the girl who can make people bend to her will with just a few words.

WAY: Klaus, he has some pretty serious addiction and addiction is something that I dealt with in my life. He’s also a little bit spooky and supernatural, and my personality in My Chemical Romance was very similar to that.

Klaus: I can’t just call Dad in the afterlife and be like, “Dad, could you just stop playing tennis with Hitler for a moment and take a quick call?” Luther: Since when? That’s your thing. Klaus: I’m not in the right frame of mind! Allison: You’re high? Klaus: Yeah yeah! I mean, how are you not listening to this nonsense?

WAY: He was kind of my version of Doctor Strange. I find Allison to be the one that is easiest to write and I put the most of myself into Allison.

B: Her superpower is that she can make you do pretty much anything she tells you with a few magic words.

Allison: I heard a rumor you want to be my friend. I heard a rumor that you like Bradley. I heard a rumor that you left me alone. I heard a rumor that you stop crying.

WAY: There’s a bit of a tragic nature that comes with her power.

B: Allison, out of all of her super powered siblings, is the only one grasping for a normal life - career, husband, children. In a way, she’s the most human. The fourth character Gerard created is Diego, a guy with an uncanny ability to throw knives. He’s also stubborn as hell.

WAY: I knew early on he was gonna be the one that was gonna be really difficult with the leader. I figured that.

Diego: You know, you of all people should be on my side here, Number One. Luther: I am warning you. Diego: After everything he did to you, he had to ship you a million miles away. Luther: Diego, stop talking! Diego: That’s how much he couldn’t stand the sight of you!

B: The fifth character, a kid who can travel through time and space, who simply goes by Five. Despite the other character growing up into adults, he has remained a teenager, sort of.

WAY: He was a time traveler who then got stuck in his young body when he traveled back in time because time travel is complicated.

Klaus: Where are you going? Five: To get a decent cup of coffee. Allison: Do you even know how to drive? Five: I know how to do everything.

WAY: So then came The Horror.

B: The Horror, aka Ben, aka the dead sibling who only Klaus can see.

WAY: I imagined this character that had all these monsters living under his skin that came from another dimension. And he was very tortured to me. It actually kind of hurts him and it’s scary to him.

Ben: Do I really have to do this? Klaus: Come on, Ben. There’s more guys in the vault. Ben: I didn’t sign up for this.

B: And then finally, Number Seven, Vanya, who seemingly has no powers besides playing the violin.

WAY: I was at this cafe in Manhattan when I was living in Brooklyn, and it was called The Sidewalk Cafe I believe, and on the wall they had a white violin just as decoration. And I remember looking at that and thinking to myself, “That would be a cool superhero.” And Vanya was always kind of designed to be a character who wasn’t special, that was going to transform into that.

Vanya: Look, if I was special I would’ve been in The Umbrella Academy. I’m so sorry you got stuck with the ordinary one.

B: These seven adopted siblings forced together by supernatural events formed The Umbrella Academy. Both the original comic and season 1 of the show start at the funeral for the Academy’s patriarch, the eccentric Sir Reginald Hargreeves. We learn that while the siblings ventured away from home as teenagers, after years of fighting and a toxic upbringing, they’ve returned home, back together for the first time in years, and all their dysfunctions and old conflicts come bubbling to the surface.

Diego: He was a bad person and a worse father. The world’s better off without him. Allison: Diego! Diego: My name is Number Two.

B: When he started writing the comic, Gerard was focused on his own strained relationships. He saw his band as his own dysfunctional family at the time.

WAY: When you’re a baby band, you’re in this van and it’s like a submarine but it’s smaller. It’s like a closet that you're all living in and sometimes you’re going on seventeen hour drives, and you have very strong personalities. This dynamic starts to develop between all of the members and you really do kind of become a dysfunctional family. Like, there’s times where I felt like I was the mom.

GABRIEL BA: They know each other’s weaknesses.

B: Turns out, family dynamics was a theme with everyone who joined the Umbrella team, including the illustrator and Umbrella’s co-creator, a Brazilian artist named Gabriel Ba.

BA: And sometimes they say it to hurt the other intentionally and they do that a lot in Umbrella because they’re all angry at each other all the time. And even though I have a great relationship with my brother, I have that. We have a younger sister as well, so she’s very opinionated and she’s strong. I wouldn’t say we fight a lot, but sometimes we- I just know how to hurt her if I want to say something.

B: Family is present in Gabriel’s life more than for most people. He works every day with his twin brother, fellow comic book artist, Fabio Moon. But his work made him an unconventional choice for Umbrella.

BA: In the mid 90s, we moved away from superheroes. We, my brother and I, we figured the type of story that we liked to tell and wanted to tell was more real life, day by day life relationship, this kind of stuff.

B: Gabriel grew up in Brazil and now lives in Sao Paulo. His brother had been making experimental comics for well over a decade.

BA: But The Umbrella Academy was a superhero book with this day by day life relationship drama, and that was really interesting for me.

B: What excited Gerard about Gabriel was his style. His characters weren’t macho. They didn’t have big ripped muscles. They’re the kind of comics you could imagine being drawn in the margins of a notebook. There's nothing stereotypically super about them.

BA: It was not a straightforward American superhero artstyle. It was a mix of European and more fluid, but also could handle action and crazy stuff. And also, I can’t deny The Umbrella Academy was my first paid job in the U.S.

B: Wow.

BA: For the first ten years of our career, my brother and I were making comics for free. Just for ourselves, just getting [?], if there were any. So when I got the invitation to get involved with The Umbrella Academy it was this whole package of factors.

WAY: Gabriel climbing on board was a huge thing for us because he’s such a fantastic artist. He brought these characters to life. The interesting thing about Gabriel, he didn’t have to make Umbrella Academy. He was doing really well on his own and making really experimental artistic comics, but he liked the idea so much that he said, “I’m gonna do superheroes.”

BA: The superhero aspect of The Umbrella Academy is really just a layer in the story. I like the development of these characters, their struggles, their relationships, there’s romance, there’s deception.

Vanya: You are unbelievable, you’re trying to dig up dirt on a guy I like? Who does that? Allison: Look, I’ve had my fair share of stalkers and creeps, I don’t trust him! Vanya: You mean you don’t trust me.

BA: And it had the fun explosions and action scenes. So that’s the good mix.

B: The first book of the comic is called Apocalypse Suite. After their father’s death, The Umbrella Academy gets a warning from their time traveling brother that the world is going to end in 10 days. They don’t know how, they just know that it will. And now, back together for the first time, they’ve got to figure out how to save the planet and learn how to look past their differences. Which sounds dope, right? But when it first published back in 2007, it wasn’t immediately clear that people would dig it.

WAY: So one of the things I was dealing with when Umbrella Academy came out was a lot of people in the press before the comic came out saying things like, “Here’s a musician and he’s writing a comic.” They didn’t really know my background, they didn’t know that I’d written at 15, they didn’t know I went to art school. All they knew was that I was the singer in this rock band that a lot of teenagers liked. So, all I really wanted was a fair shake. I didn’t write The Umbrella Academy to become a TV show or a film. I wrote it to be an amazing comic. But we knew that first issue, and we knew it was good, and we knew that if you didn't get it by the first seven pages you just weren’t gonna like it, and I was totally fine with that. But then it came out and then the response started to happen and then reviewers loved it and people loved it.

B: The comic went on to win an Eisner award, which is like the Oscar of comics, and pretty quickly, Gerard gets an offer to turn the comic into a full length movie.

WAY: I got swept up in the Hollywood thing.

B: But it doesn’t pan out.

WAY: That’s actually one of the reasons why there was such a big gap between comics, is because I was really, you know, I was trying- at the end of the day, I was trying to be helpful. If this was gonna be a movie version of what Gabriel and I had made, I wanted it to be great so I put in a lot of time and it kept me away from the comics.

B: But then Netflix hits you up and is interested in making this into a series.

WAY: Right.

B: I guess I'm curious, as someone who just initially wanted to make just a really good comic, what about turning that project into a television show was interesting?

WAY: Straight up, I want to make a great comic and that’s all I’m really interested in. If I can write great comics, you’ll have great material to make TV shows. So let me focus on that.

B: In other words, Gerard wanted to focus on the comics and let someone else adapt it.

WAY: And that’s when Steve came in and he changed things and he ran with it.

STEVE BLACKMAN: I’m Steve Blackman, I’m the showrunner and I’m executive producer.

B: Steve is a master at adapting books, comics, and film into television. Before The Umbrella Academy, he’d worked on shows like Fargo, Legion, and Altered Carbon, all of which originated from other sources. So he knew coming in that adaptation can be tricky work.

BLACKMAN: At first, I think Gerard and Gabriel, who co-did this with him, were very protective of the work like parents of their baby. And I think I had to prove to them initially that I would love and protect this child that they had worked on for so many years, so here I am, an outsider coming in and they were very nice to me, but I could see there was like, “Is this guy gonna totally screw up our baby here?”

B: Is it something that you can come to the table with Gerard and be like, “Hey, here’s my arsenal of adaptations, this is why it will work.”

BLACKMAN: Yeah, I worked on the show Fargo for three years. Fargo was obviously based on the Joel and Ethan Coen movie from 1996. I don’t think Gerard had ever seen my shows, I don’t think he watches a lot of television, so for him, it didn’t matter what I’d done before. It’s just what I was gonna do in the here and now on this show. I wasn’t intimidated by the challenge but I really did sort of have a sense of I know which direction I’m going.

B: What was your first initial reaction? Were you sort of like, “Oh, maybe I’ve never done anything like this, or this does feel familiar to other work that I’ve done.” Or, “I can do this, this is right up my alley.”

BLACKMAN: Well, what I liked about it from the beginning was what I saw in the subject matter and I saw a dysfunctional family. But right away, I was very inspired by Wes Anderson’s work. The Royal Tenenbaums is one of those movies that really was always something I truly loved. So, I saw that in this show.

Five: An entire square block, 42 bedrooms, 19 bathrooms, but not a single drop of coffee. Vanya: Dad hated caffeine. Klaus: Well he hated children too and he had plenty of us.

BLACKMAN: It was a family show, it was a very relatable dysfunctional family show that I wanted to tell.

WAY: Steve’s a great collaborator. Steve Blackman, the showrunner, he had a vision. I respected him and his vision. I realized it was gonna be different from the comic, and I let him run with it because he cared deeply about it.

BLACKMAN: My first conversation with Gerard over the phone, I said to him, I told him one of the words was subversive, we wanted to subvert the expectation of what a superhero show could be because there were many other shows, either on the air or coming down the pipe to be next, and we wanted this to stand out. And that was sort of the first hurdle with me, was to say to Gerard that I could do that and I could definitely make this thing feel special. And right away he said, “Okay, yeah. You get it.”

B: You’ve adapted something like Fargo which is a unique adaptation, right? You’re adapting from a different medium, like a feature film. Does that change the way you understand adaptation?

BLACKMAN: At a story point of view, no, I don’t think they’re that different. I think adapting a story, whether it's a graphic novel or the source material comes from a movie, a book, there’s a lot of care into doing it that the tricky thing is, I need to put my creative spin on it. I had Gerard and Gabriel, who lived with this for ten years, and then I have to come in and say, “Look, I’m going to honor you. At the same time, what is the Steve Blackman part of the show? How can I add my spin to it?”

B: For fans of the comic who’ve seen season 1 of the show, you’ll recognize some of that Steve Blackman spin. For example, the group who governs the laws of time in the comics, the Temps Aeternalis, in the TV show they become the Commission, an entire bureaucratic system running and adjusting linear time. Steve made some other changes too.

WAY: One of the things that I thought was an ingenious idea was making Ben a ghost that Klaus could communicate with. I was most impressed by that change.

Ben: You know what the worst part of being dead is? You’re stuck. Nowhere to go, nowhere to change, that’s the real torture if you gotta know. Watching your brother take for granted everything you lost, and pissing it all away.

B: Perhaps the biggest change from the comic to the show is the diversity of the characters. Diverse in race, diverse in region, diverse in sexual orientation, these characters on screen look a lot more like what the world actually looks like.

WAY: It’s built into it. They’re all from different places, they’re all from different countries, so I think that’s really the biggest improvement on the source material, is how diverse it is.

B: Steve felt the pressure of both fan expectations, and Gerard and Gabriel’s trust in him.

BLACKMAN: There’s nothing worse than having pre-existing source material and having the fans dislike it. You want to make the fans feel honored and respected, at the same time I felt it was incredibly important that Gerard and Gabriel walked out of this thinking, “He did a good job.” If they hated it, I would’ve been crushed. If the fans hated it, I think I’d also be crushed. I knew I couldn’t make everybody happy, but I wasn’t doing a page for page translation. My adaptation wasn’t gonna be that.

B: The adaption worked. Season 1 was a massive success. In the finale of the first season, the Academy thinks they’ve managed to stop the end of the world from happening, but unintentionally, they’ve actually just initiated it. The moon has been destroyed and its remnants are now heading directly for Earth.

Five: We might as well accept our fate because in less than a minute we’re gonna be vaporized. Diego: What’s your idea then? Five: We use my ability to time travel, but this time I’ll take you with me. Luther: You can do that?

B: The family, latching onto their time traveling brother Five, manage to escape the chaos. But we’re left to wonder where and when they’ll turn up, and that’s where season 2 begins.

Five: We brought the end of the world back here with us. Klaus: Oh my god, again?

BLACKMAN: It’s a pretty crazy journey this year and I think people will be hooked. I hope they binge the hell out of it and love every second of it.

B: Coming up in this season of Behind the Scenes, we’ll be taking you on that crazy journey with the people who make it happen.

“We hired meteorologists, we knew that snow was gonna come, but we had planned it. We went away for a day, we came back, and there was four feet of snow on the ground.”

“It’s 60s Dallas. Okay, so that’s a very different story for Allison. We have to talk about this somehow. Her experience is just different from her siblings.”

EMMY LAMPMAN: And a lot of people would come up to me and apologize for doing their job and I was like, “Please stop apologizing.”

“That was a wishlist fight scene that Steve had always wanted to do.”

“So we actually had our guys throwing plates up in the air and taking photos of them to try to get these UFO imageries.”

“You know, we have a new point in our resume: Can produce and deliver a show during a pandemic.”

B: Behind the Scenes of The Umbrella Academy is a Netflix and Pineapple Street Studios Production. I’m your host, Brandon Jenkins. Make sure to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. It really does help other people find it. Thank you all for listening.

#behind the scenes of the umbrella academy #episode 1 #gerard way #gabriel ba #steve blackman #full transcription

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press-x-tojason · 3 years

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Giant Bomb is dead, and I care way less than I thought I would. Probably because 83% of the people who I ever cared about had already left or died, or were already relegated to reduced content roles.

Honestly, though, the writing’s been on the wall for a bit. They haven’t had anything worthy of paying for premium in several years, and, even though they’ve had well over a year to figure out a plan for the COVID era, they maybe made it a month with their plans to have a series of streams daily. I actually managed to forget I followed them on Twitch at all, for about 4 months, because they only streamed the podcasts and the occasional former Harmonix employee (who was literally paid to make content with their games while employed at Giant Bomb, which was funny because he blocked me on Twitter for making a post, addressing no one, back in 2014, which was asking about the legitimacy of the leaked list of “games “””””journalists”””””” who had taken money from publishers for positive reviews, a list which included him and multiple then-coworkers. I didn’t follow him, he didn’t follow me. He was manually searching the keywords, because he was, and is, a prick.) solo Rock Band stream in the last 8 months or so. Even when Jeff would manage to do one of his 20 streams from home a year, it would be on his own channel. There was just no content. And they’re surprised their “pay for our unique premium content!” model failed. They always “feigned” anger at Dan for “making” them do the Mario Party Parties, and literally never promoted his and Drew’s Metal Gear series after the first game... but I bet that, when only those, UPF, and the ad-free versions of the podcasts were premium features, those two series were keeping them afloat. Well, that and the remaining goodwill they miraculously managed to hold onto for a few years after Ryan died. Shit, I follow several people who are GB staff-adjacent, and... I can’t think of the last time they mentioned anything that happened on-site. Even the people who’ve been directly supporting them for over 10 years were out.

But yeah, the site is super dead. They pretended in the announcements like they’re going to make a go of it still, but... you’ve got like 4 content people left, and the only one people give a shit about is Jeff. You just saw 3/4 of the side of the site that was still trying these past several months jump ship in a 3 month span. One of those was, by nearly any definition, a founding member. Of which you had already lost one, and are losing another from the main side. Jeff’s been way less active until the last week or two, probably because he heard they were leaving and was like “oops, should probably check on the ship that’s been sinking for years!” Then you have Jason “The Human Mumble” Oestricher, the charisma vacuum, whose legitimate public-facing reaction to first hearing that all but one of his GB predecessors were going to be gone. was, and I quote, “Hoo Boy.” Ben and Jan are the definition of “fine”. They would have been great, as they are today, as secondary members 8-10 years ago. But carry the site, they cannot. They’re down to, what, 5 named members now? It hasn’t been that dire since the beginning of 2009, before they hired Drew, when they hadn’t even started the P4 endurance run. You know, that surprise massive, internet-changing thing that essentially popularized the Let’s Play concept, loosening its definition and making it something that could be as personality-driven as game-driven, made simply to give them something to put on the website, beyond the rare review and, slightly later, quick look. This kinda illustrates the problem with modern Giant Bomb. When they were figuring shit out, flying by the seats of their pants, they came up with great shit, and they gave enough of a shit to make it happen. 0.000% chance they do a 10 hour Thanksgiving Kinect stream if the Kinect was new today. 0.000% chance the core members would have done an endurance run in the last 10 years if CT and Shenmue (which I haven’t watched) weren’t driven by the younger members. And you could see it in the fact that they never made a real, true mobile app. The number one thing that would have made them indispensable this past decade, an app to integrate premium features, the podcast, their video player, etc. all in one place in a mobile-friendly package, that could sync with the website... and they never even raised the idea publicly. I wonder how much of the innovation was the group think-tank of the first 5 years. Beyond Dan’s couple major contributions, I don’t think they added a single new type of content after 2012, which... still means the last 6.5 years lacked any semblance of innovation. I guess that’s a big part of why I fell off tremendously quickly after late 2014. There was just nothing new, and believe me, I was looking. I wanted reasons to stay watching. I supported them with my dollar. I believed in those brave early days. And I went back yesterday to watch the DP endurance run from VJ again. I still miss that rapport. And really, that hurt, too. Vinny moving back east, less than a year after Ryan passed... short term, it was fine. You had more people than ever to cover the gaps. But the spark was gone. The chemistry made the site. When I think of Giant Bomb, I still think of Jeff, Vinny, and Ryan, first and foremost. Those early podcasts, the NintenDownloads, the crazy tangents that everyone could seamlessly follow up on(well, except Brad, because he essentially slept through most of the podcasts, unless he was talking about the thing he did that week), the weird high-concept GOTY stuff... it wasn’t perfect, but you were entertained. You laughed. You were engaged. It never felt like you were watching them working, even though you could see the work they put in. It felt like, when they released something, you were experiencing a group of legitimate friends doing what they wanted to do anyways.(And boy have I seen enough groups do everything they can to NOT be enjoying doing that, and break up as a result due to hating the jobs that they chose to do).

Part of me would love to make it as simple as “Ryan died, and so did the original spirit”, and... to a degree, it’s true. If you go back to any retrospective they’ve done about the founding of the site, or the podcast they recorded after Ryan passed, you can’t help but recognize that Giant Bomb never happens if these core members don’t all quit their jobs, led by Ryan, because they respect their boss/manager, Jeff, and know he’s doing the right things(for them, for the reader/viewer, etc.) ahead of what GameSpot management wants him to do. Jeff could have been left in the wilderness, trying find a spot elsewhere, with the rumor going around between executives that Jeff wasn’t going to help them promote anything, essentially killing their revenue. He would have been done in terms of getting employed by a major site. But Ryan first, and soon after, Vinny and Brad, gave up their jobs to make this fledgling little project go. As much as the ERs brought me in and gave the impression that Jeff and Vinny were the long-standing duo, no, it was Ryan who was Jeff’s partner in crime. And, 8 years later, I can comfortably say... Giant Bomb never recovered from losing him.

But it was so much more. Everything that set them apart slowly went away, in time. I don’t think they’ve posted reviews for games in consecutive MONTHS since 2017; 2018 at the latest. They have done one Endurance Run in 9 years. They have not had a meaningful live event in 6 years. Unprofessional Fridays were more formulaic and lesser in volume and frequency after the major players started moving east. The lack of coordination between coasts killed the camaraderie, to the point that I think one of the last 5 true gameplay crossovers was their series of 2016-2017 PUBG shitfests. I remember when Vinny starting GBEast was supposed to be the start of a new era of content, and... it was, but not in a positive way, like it sounded. When half of each side seemed to constantly have no interest in making anything, nothing got made. But I guess that’s what happens when your second in command in one of your headquarters is just a former marketing grunt with an attitude problem, and the guy with the biggest ego on the team is the one who refuses to move to join either side, and just pushes out the most self-important drivel as a header to what were literally just copy-pasted articles from other sites every week while sitting at his desk, dreaming of the days Gawker would pay him to plagiarize political drivel instead, because that’s what really gets the soulless clicks. One of your founding members becomes depressed due to losing his two closest work friends, one for real, one to a 3000 mile separation, within a year, while the other one who is left virtually stopped playing anything but DOTA 2 for 2 years. Suddenly your most prominent personalities are the 2 new guys(one the aforementioned charisma vacuum, the other a walking mark) and your previously-mostly-off-camera producer who is best known to the wider Internet for... blinking. So, yeah, lifeless. And NOW, all you’ve got is old melancholy dad, charisma vacuum dad, and the two ADHD kids whose defining trait is that they choose to exclusively refer to their partners as “my partner” in voices that make it sound like they are embarrassed to have partners, while also talking more about what their partners are doing than what they do. It’s confounding.

But yeah, TL:DR: RIP zombie Giant Bomb. Glad you’re finally getting taken behind the shed. It took 3 years too long, minimum.

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chixibrown · 4 years

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Upon finishing the Stardew Valley comic

Since the Stardew Valley comic has been released by Fangamer, I am now able to write about what I had been doing in secret for one long year.

■ Gratitude

First of all, to the original creator Eric-san who entrusted the task in my hands, to Kari-san who helped me from early development all the way to printing, to Ryan-san, to Steven-san who did the translations, to Kari-san's mother who assisted in the creation of the envelope, to Erica-san for product photography -- And last but not least, everyone at Fangamer and FangamerJP.

It's thanks to the support of many people that I was able to finish the comic, and I wish to extend my sincerest gratitude towards everyone involved.

■ Chronology

"Chihiro! Big News! Let's create a new merch together!" was a request that I received around autumn of 2018. At first I was wondering if I was going to be asked to design a T-shirt, but turned out to be an invitation to draw a comic book!

At that time, I was posting comics on Twitter at random. Not even in my wildest dreams have I thought that my little comics would be appreciated so, and thus I immediately burst into tears.

I'm very honored and thankful for the opportunity to pen Fangamer's very first comic.

■ Contents

I'll try not to spoil anything about the story in this section.

The content requested by the original creator Eric-san for the comic was: "The story before the farmer comes to the farm" "With focus on the community center and Joja" "And the protagonist should have no set characteristics"

These were really the ONLY information that we received from Eric-san throughout the whole process (whyyy).

I was definitely worried. In reality, for around six months when I did my preliminary research, I played Stardew Valley every day, took countless pictures, and absorbed myself in collecting materials.

I I ended up taking a little over 20 thousand screenshots total (lol).

I wholeheartedly agree with Eric-san's guideline not to give the protagonist any set characteristics. I think one of the keypoints of this game is that "Anyone can be the protagonist".

The story is set from a few years before the prologue of game, so I was rather careful not to show my own personal interpretation. In principle, the actions of the characters were mostly taken from their in-game dialogue where they mention having done something in the past (For example, the reason Sam got in trouble lmao).

It took a lot of effort outlining the story, which involved things such as "Which characters would be in contact with each other?" and "Which characters may not be present at the valley at the time?". This is the reason why the preliminary research took around six months.

By the way, I was the one who proposed to include a "letter" with the comic, both as a bonus and major spoiler, in a way. But uh, many fellow Japanese may not be able to read it, so... I'll secretly tell you the what's actually written on the letter:

It's the handwritten version of THE letter you receive in the English version of the game's prologue. It's in your hands now. So in conclusion, it's probably exactly what you think it was.

I was quite adamant about how the letter needs to be handwritten. And as who wrote it... I shall keep it a secret here.

The reason why the comic had little to no dialogue is because it was the style I had back from the time I was drawing Stardew Valley fan art. Since Stardew Valley is a media not originally from Japan, that style serves to fulfill my two wishes: "I want people all over the world to be able to read my work" and "I want to cherish the feelings of each individual player" -- That sort of idea, really.

To summarize,

"I want people all over the world to be able to read my work"

"I want to preserve the unique interpretations each individual player might have"

"Anyone can become a Stardew Valley protagonist"

I drew the comic with these concepts in mind.

■ About me

I would like to talk about my experiences throughout the development of the comic.

My name is Chihiro Sakaida (a.k.a. Brown Junimo), I was already working for a game company, so I took advantage of that experience to work on game design and illustration.

Of course, while I was working on the Stardew Valley comic, I was a freelancer and had other jobs to worry about as well, so I ended up spending a lot of time working on the comic at night after work. I also studied digital art for a month for the sake of the comic, and I think it helped improved my work efficiency.

Those were truly, very fun days for me. The only thing that did bother me was the fact that even though I was working on my favorite Stardew Valley content day after day, I couldn't really share it with anyone.

I didn't want to take the risk of accidentally running my mouth on Twitter, and I no longer had the time to draw and post online like I used to -- So I had to resort to posting only low-risk tweets, so to speak, and to be honest, it was quite disheartening.

As such, I felt truly supported by the trusted individuals who knew about the comic. Tori-san, Aki-san, Kari-san, and Ryan-san, thank you so, so much.

■ Those who supported me

Tori-san is my partner, and also a person I respect as a novelist and screenwriter. She kindly and carefully reviewed and summarized my messy story.

Aki-san knew about the comic existed, but also knew next to nothing about it. Because of that, I think it was more than a handful to support me. It must've been really hard on Aki-san, who didn't know the contents of the book and thus had no way to accidentally spoiling the surprise, but whom also probably held even more feelings of shame than I did in regards to social media... I'm sorry that you've had to put up with so much. I was very proud to have you be the first reader of the finished book.

Kari-san is the illustrator of the Official Stardew Valley Guide Book, and I respect her a whole lot.

Both her work are her personality are very kind and easy-going. Together with her partner Ryan-san, she's managed to assist and encourage me many, many times.

No matter what I drew, I was sure to be greeted with her "Chihiro, you're so great!" or "Chihiro, you really did your best!" (Even my own mother have never praise me this much!) Overall, she feels just like an older sister I've always longed for, and it makes me very happy.

No matter what merch was in the process of being created, she would say "Let's make a brown one!!", solely because it's my signature color. It makes me very happy, although probably a tiny bit embarrassed as well to have her value my one schtick this much. She's even came to Japan many times, and listened to me talk all day long. After all, I wouldn't have been able to get this job to begin with if it wasn't for Kari-san, so she's a real lifesaver.

I didn't get to talk directly with Eric-san, the original creator and developer of Stardew Valley. Obviously I received some feedback via Fangamer, but I was refraining from being in contact with him as much as possible. I didn't think I could convey my full sincerity towards him before the comic was completed. I strived to be able to earnestly understand the feelings he wanted to convey via his own words -- Whether it was the game dialogues, his words on the developer blog and interviews, etc.

There was, by the way, no revision whatsoever to the comic. Eric-san did, however, carefully check all of my ideas and always provided words of appreciation; which made me happier than anything else. Those words became my motivation to live, in a sense, which in turn allowed me to freely and happily work on the comic.

■ Going Forward

While I've been talking about how proud I am to have finished the comic, I also would like to talk about what's coming next. While I certainly plan to continue working with Fangamer for the foreseeable future, at the same time, I have also decided to work for another game development company, and I plan to devote my time working on game development for at least the next year.

It has been my dream for the past 15 years to work for this particular company, and I'm elated to see it come true.

However, as a result I think I will have less exposure to social media. I don't think it's going to be easy to recreate that warm and wondrous time where I could interact with people regularly, but my memory of that time is something I will treasure for the rest of my life.

I'm really sorry that I have absolutely nothing to give back, but I sincerely hope the comic has brought a smile to everyone who's read or even merely noticed it.

■ Finally

I'm such a fortunate person -- I've come this far due to everyone's support, and for that, I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude. Thank you so much, for everything, always.

It would delight me if all of you could stay with me from this point on.

As I try to polish my skills and improve myself as a whole.

PS: Thanks to my best friend Ryou-chan for translating this!

#stardew valley

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esonetwork · 3 years

Text

Who is Captain Future?

New Post has been published on https://esonetwork.com/who-is-captain-future/

Who is Captain Future?

The Big Bang Theory

This month (for me, anyways) has been all about Captain Future. I have been living, breathing, eating and sleeping Edmond Hamilton’s pulp era science fiction hero.

But who is Captain Future? Popular in his hey day, the 1940’s, the final decade of the pulp magazines, today he is an obscure character, encountered by the younger generation either through an almost equally as obscure Japanese Anime series or through the medium of the sit-com The Big Bang Theory as a somewhat prominent poster on display in Leonard and Sheldon’s apartment.

None of which answers the question: Who is Captain Future?

For that answer I turn to the Hugo award winning science fiction writer Allen M. Steele.

Cover art by Earle K. Bergey

“Captain Future is a creation of Edmond Hamilton,” says Steele. “The legend is that in 1939 at the World Science Fiction Convention the publisher of Startling Stories, Mort Wesinger, went to the convention in New York city and was so impressed by the turnout and the enthusiasm of the fans that, on the spot, he announced that they were going to create a new magazine called Captain Future.”

The actual story is a little more complicated than that, Allen explains. “By the time the World Science Fiction convention rolled around Better Publications had already decided that they wanted to publish a ‘hero’ pulp to compete with Doc Savage and The Shadow and The Avenger and other characters who were very popular at that time.”

Weisinger had come up with a character he called Mister Future who was the world’s smartest man and had this huge head. He lived on top of a skyscraper and he had an alien being named Otho who lived in his ring. He took his idea to science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton.

“Hamilton said: No this isn’t going to do, so he borrowed a little bit of Doc Savage and a little bit of Batman and various other creations that were out there and he came up with something entirely new. That was Captain Future.” Steele explains.

Cover art by Tommy Pocket

“The first issue appeared in late 1939. It was a quarterly magazine and Hamilton wrote all but three adventures. It lasted until the mid-1940’s and, like so many other pulps, was killed off by the wartime paper crunch. Some more adventures were published in Startling Stories for a couple of issues after that. Then he went away for a while. The series was briefly revived in 1950 as a series of short novellas, again, in Startling Stories.”

The character went away again in 1951. “They said: It’s going to go on a short hiatus,” Steele explains. “And that hiatus ended up lasting until I revived the character a few years ago. Basically Captain Future is a spacegoing version of Doc Savage. Doc Savage was an early predecessor to James Bond and a lot of other characters. He’s a troubleshooter. He’s a hero. Hamilton’s version of the character had him being a super scientist.

“He’s an adventurer, and he has this weird cast of characters, the Futuremen. They go about the solar system righting wrongs, protecting the common man and fighting the good fight. This is something that attracted me a great deal when I read those adventures when I was a kid.”

Cover art by M. D. Jackson

So much so, that Steele took over the mantle from Edmond Hamilton and began writing new adventures featuring the pulp hero. “One of the first Captain Future novels I read was Outlaws of the Moon. My first Captain Future, Avengers of the Moon, was very much an homage to that particular title.”

Avengers of the Moon was published by Tor Books in 2017. For Steele it was a dream come true and one he wanted to continue. Unfortunately the editor who signed off on the project died. His replacement was not as interested in continuing with the series.

Fortunately Steve Davidson and his Experimenter Publishing Company, picked up the idea. Steve, the publisher behind the revival of Amazing Stories Magazine, has been releasing a series of novels under his Amazing Selects imprint, and Allen Steele’s Captain Future novels are among those releases.

Illustration by H. W. Wessolowski

The books are fully illustrated, much like the Captain Future novels from the original pulp run. This is where I come in.

The second Captain Future novel began with a longer story called Captain Future in Love. It was serialized over two issues and I was fortunate enough to be tasked with producing the cover art for the second issue.

The story was re-printed by Amazing Selects, followed by the next two instalments of an overarching story. The Guns of Pluto continued the story as does the sequel, 1500 Light Years from Home. Both books feature black and white illustrations.

Illustration by M. D. Jackson

This, for me, has been an incredible opportunity to pick up where pulp artists Earle K. Bergey who painted the covers, and Hans Waldemar Wessolowski, credited as H. W. Wessolowski (also sometimes simply as as “Wesso”) who drew the interior illustrations. As a life long fan of the pulp magazines, this is obviously a dream assignment.

I have completed the illustrations for 1500 Light Years from Home and the book is scheduled to be released sometime in the next month. I am hoping to be involved in the fourth and concluding instalment which will be released either later this year or early 2022.

But there was to be an unexpected bonus this month. I had got wind that a magazine, The Pulp Fan, was on the lookout for artists to provide portraits of pulp characters. I contacted the publisher, Jim Main and asked if there was anything that I could do. He suggested that I could paint a portrait of Captain Future.

This was the icing on an already delicious cake. The Allen Steele Captain Future books have been “updated”. The science has been brought into line with what we know now about the solar system. Steele didn’t want to have the setting be the “quaint” one that Edmond Hamilton had created. Just as his stories reflected the science as it was understood at the time, so does Allen Steele’s Captain Future. So that the illustrations will not look dated or out of place in the 21st century, I adapted a similar esthetic.

This, then, for Pulp Fan was a chance to present Captain Future as he was back in the 1940’s, anachronisms and all. I am working on it was we speak and, I have to tell you, I am having a heck of a lot of fun with it.

The Pulp Fan issue #3 will be available soon from Main Enterprises.

Allen Steele’s Captain Future: 1500 Light Years from Home will be available from Amazing Selects. You can find that and his other Captain Future Books here.

#Allen M. Steele #Captain Future #Earle K. Bergey #Edmond Hamilton #H. W. Wessolowsky #pulp heroes #Startling Stories #Wesso

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