Pls do not reblog anything with the old disability pride flag, it does cause seizure and migraines, please use the new one which was created by the same person with the feedbacks of many other disabled people.

This is the safe one:

Dont use the zigzag one, your making disabled space inaccessible for a part of the community.

[Image ID: tumblr tags reading “I appreciate the fact that it’s by the same person” and “like a quality of life softwar[e] update but for a flag”. End ID]

patch notes 1.0.1: visual contrast no longer causes strobe effect when scrolling. Zigzag design was difficult to visually process and anxiety inducing, and was removed. Colors have been lightened and desaturated. For the safety of all users, please make sure you are up to date.

Since July is Disability Pride Month

(as opposed to every other month when we're all demure about disability rights /gentle sarcasm)

I wanted to highlight one of my favorite artists: Liberal Jane.

Idk I just think that “I have empathy for the friends and family of those that were lost” and “based on everything we’ve learned, going down in that death-trap was an incredibly stupid decision and anyone could see that” and “it is ridiculous anyone would pay 250k to go see a mass grave, the wealth gap has gotten out of hand so I can’t find it in myself to shed tears for the men involved” and “it is heartbreaking a teenage boy was lost because he wanted to impress his father” are statements that can coexist.

Human emotions are grey.

hot take: the reason Lord of the Rings doesn’t go much into Aragorn’s tax policy is bcos Lord of the Rings is not about Aragorn. Lord of the Rings is about hobbits.

more specifically, lord of the rings is about Frodo’s journey. it starts with him getting the Ring and ends with him leaving middle earth. what Aragorn did as king is not expanded on in detail bcos it’s of 0 relevance to Frodo on account of he sailed off to the Undying Lands.

the majority of the societies visited are not described in detail and have an ‘unreal’, story-book quality compared to the Shire bcos our point of view characters are the hobbits and we are experiencing these places as they do. the Shire, their home, is in contrast very real and grounded and detailed.

#i love this post bcuz its just a direct drag of george r r martin

yes that’s exactly what it is

He actually summed it up really well.

"Addi" by Carol Milne, knitted glass, undated.

How the FUCK

knitted WHAT now

It’s not a Discworld joke unless you read it, don’t parse it as a joke, and then carry on with your life for ten years until someone stops you to say something like “It’s a pavlovian response because the dog ate a pavlova” and you scream Terry’s name with enough indignant rage you hope it rattles the pillars of the multiverse so wherever his soul is he’ll hear it.

#i don’t think this is what pterry meant by ‘a man’s not dead while his name is still spoken’

I absolutely think it is

I read Jingo for the first time when I was 13.

I’m 33 now, and I still discover a new joke every time I reread it.

Terry was a comedic genius

#shoutout to the one in Soul Music about the leopard that got thrown out of the circus because it couldn't hear the ringmaster#it was several months after my second or third time reading the book that I clocked it was a Deaf Leopard (via @morkaischosen)

god DAMMIT

When I was informed that “Vetinari” is a pun on “Medici”. That pun was so painful I couldn’t even see it.

...are you FUCKING KIDDING ME.

*starts thunderously knocking on the doors of heaven*

get out here Terry I just wanna talk

Twurp’s Peerage made me throw a book (gently) at a wall.

In the UK, the book of the peerage is called Burke’s Peerage. Burke sounds like berk, which means a silly/annoying person. So Terry took ‘twerp’, another word for a silly or annoying person, and replaced the e with u. 

The Book of Silly and Annoying People, based on the real thing with a pun on the name thrown in for good measure.

i cannot stress this enough: if your reasoning for clowning on the mcu is "they overwork their cg artists and animators" i 1000% guarantee that a show or movie you have been stanning for years also abused their artists and you just haven't heard about it because the production companies aren't in the spotlight like mcu productions are. that cartoon for kids? that incredibly animated movie? that non-marvel superhero movie? i've seen people declare their hatred for the way the mcu treats their workers and then turn around and gush about a show that i know for a fact was hell for the artists attached

and no this is NOT me saying "this means you should stop hating on the mcu uwu" it's me saying you gotta be aware that this shit is an INDUSTRY WIDE PROBLEM. you CANNOT "fix" it by refusing to watch mcu movies and feeling good about it. you have to be aware that it's EVERYWHERE. why do you think so many animation and vfx productions are sourced in canada? in india and the phillipines? we are not unionized.

i know it's hard to face the idea that your favourite show might have been made unethically especially when you've spent so much time hating the mcu for doing the same thing. you don't have to start hating your favourite show. just like...be aware. don't be smarmy about it. don't claim without research that a beautifully animated movie Must mean the animators were not working 16 hour days and weekends. i do think we can fix this 👍 but we can't fix it if 90% of us don't even realize what the problem really is

now that it's come out that the spiderverse animators were working unsustainable hours yall need to be aware of this more than ever. even good movies aren't innocent of this. we often see the narrative of "see what happens if you pay animators well and give them time to work?" when it comes to good movies but. that is almost never the case. the artists are still being worked to the bone. the movie being good does not negate this.

i do find it a bit frustrating when people respond to the uncomfortable truth that some really well made pieces of art are made with crunch or other unhealthy work practices, and therefore believe that the only sustainable morally ethical alternative, are ugly/uninspiring pieces of art, like as if the bad cgi in mcu movie's aren't also the result of crunch.

recently some animators who worked on across the spider-verse talked about the unhealthy work practices that went into making the movie and while i do think this article is worth the read i do take a bit of a grain of salt with this part.

i feel at face value, the takeaway from this would be "it's impossible to make a movie like across the spider-verse without overworking the animators" but i feel like the more obvious takeaway is that making ANY project with the tight deadlines and margins that are often asked by corporations is extremely stressful and backbreaking, but also the ask of "absolute perfection" because i'm sure the movie still looked great before the constant revisionism. because like the whole rhetoric of "it's impossible to make great looking media without crunch" does not make people more tolerable to ugly look media, despite how many people post that "i want shorter games with uglier looking graphics" meme online.

tl:dr saying stuff like "it's impossible to make something that looks as good as spider-verse without crunch" is kind of like saying "spider-verse looks as good as it does BECAUSE of crunch" which is, just isn't true in fact, it could of looked even better, if the animators were given more of a heads-up ahead of time instead of being forced to completely re-animated scenes that were already finished.

framing the crunch as just the natural consequence of making a film like spider-verse just kind of feeds into the whole notion that "real art requires human suffering" which like no, humans who are being treated like human beings can actually still produce art that's extremely amazing. happy people can still make movie with good animation believe it or not.

Anastasia Trusova, “Star named sun” Acrylic on canvas / 40 x 50 cm / 2022

According to NBC here in the US, the missing titanic sub has been found. As debris. Off the bow of the Titanic wreckage.

And it looks like the sub suffered what we all suspected, and what was undoubtedly the more merciful of the two options: a catastrophic implosion from the pressure.

Also, more info has come to light about the fishing trawler with the hundreds of migrants that sank cataclysmically off the coast of Greece, indicating that the greek coast guard knew about the vessel AND how much trouble the vessel was in, and were towing it at a speed that made it capsize, at which point they unhooked the tow line and watched the trawler sink without helping the passengers to safety. Despite a bunch of other ships trying to help as well throughout the whole ordeal.

So a lot of people are dead, all because of regulations (and the lack thereof) regarding sea-faring vessels and rescue protocols. People shouldnt be allowed to make a business charging a ton of money for a ride on an uncertified, unsafe, un-seaworthy ship going deep into the ocean with no distress beacon or tether to the mothership. People also shouldnt be allowed to enact laws that criminalize the ferrying of refugees, which then force the refugees to hitch rides on fishing trawlers, and which also prevent people from helping those fishing trawlers full of refugees due to fear of legal consequences.

Hopefully BOTH of these events spark changes on an international scale in terms of what is legally allowed to be sailed, who is legally allowed to be the passengers, and what the rescue protocols are in the event of disaster for any seafaring vessel, illegal or not. It shouldnt be just the global 1% who get 24/7 search parties and remote-operated submersibles helping rescue them.

Spider-Verse Artists Say Working on the Sequel Was ‘Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts’

Why don’t more animated movies look this good? According to people who worked on the sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, it’s because the working conditions required to produce such artistry are not sustainable.

Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion.

While frequent major overhauls are standard operating procedure in animation (Pixar films can take between four and seven years to plot, animate, and render), those changes typically occur early on during development and storyboarding stages. But these Spider-Verse 2 crew members say they were asked to make alterations to already-approved animated sequences that created a backlog of work across multiple late-stage departments. Across the Spider-Verse was meant to debut in theaters in April of 2022, before it was postponed to October of that year and then June 2023 owing to what Entertainment Weekly reported as “pandemic-related delays.” However, the four crew members say animators who were hired in the spring of 2021 sat idle for anywhere from three to six months that year while Phil Lord tinkered with the movie in the layout stage, when the first 3-D representation of storyboards are created.

As a result, these individuals say, they were pushed to work more than 11 hours a day, seven days a week, for more than a year to make up for time lost and were forced back to the drawing board as many as five times to revise work during the final rendering stage.

"For animated movies, the majority of the trial-and-error process happens during writing and storyboarding. Not with fully completed animation. Phil’s mentality was, This change makes for a better movie, so why aren’t we doing it? It’s obviously been very expensive having to redo the same shot several times over and have every department touch it so many times. The changes in the writing would go through storyboarding. Then it gets to layout, then animation, then final layout, which is adjusting cameras and placements of things in the environment. Then there’s cloth and hair effects, which have to repeatedly be redone anytime there’s an animation change. The effects department also passes over the characters with ink lines and does all the crazy stuff like explosions, smoke, and water. And they work closely with lighting and compositing on all the color and visual treatments in this movie. Every pass is plugged into editing. Smaller changes tend to start with animation, and big story changes can involve more departments like visual development, modeling, rigging, and texture painting. These are a lot of artists affected by one change. Imagine an endless stream of them."

"Over 100 people left the project because they couldn’t take it anymore. But a lot stayed on just so they could make sure their work survived until the end — because if it gets changed, it’s no longer yours. I know people who were on the project for over a year who left, and now they have little to show for it because everything was changed. They went through the hell of the production and then got none of their work coming out the other side."

pushing daisies really was a modern retelling of orpheus and eurydice in which they knew they wouldnt make it out of the underworld so instead they simply built a life together on the stairs

Unrestrained summer fun

Happy First Day of Summer! (northern hemisphere)

Have you grabbed your watermelon? 🍉

this whole oceangate submarine fiasco has actually led to a lot of interesting talks and debates about the grey area of human empathy vs the inclination to recoil at the bizarre behaviors of the ultra wealthy and how people struggle with both ideas and is actually very interesting to watch play out in different types of people

this is probably the best take I’ve heard so far on the debate of people being told that they aren’t having enough ‘compassion’ for billionaires making bad decisions and paying the obvious consequences for it

I hope they find the idiot rich ppl I hope a teenager doesn't have to die a horrible nightmare death and then I also hope they immediately get slapped with a $500,000 bill to repay the taxpayer cost of rescuing them from their idiocracy and then also another $1billion dollars inconvenience fee of making us all hear about this for 3 days straight.

@prev no there is not and I'd appreciate it if u left this kind of shit off my post. The internet is eroding people's empathy to a dangerous extent and this kind of gleeful bullshit just continues that pattern. Slowly suffocating in a coffin at the bottom of the ocean is a horrible way to die, no matter who you are. You shouldn't be celebrating like it's something funny or fun.

alright. in my tepidly professional opinion* here are the actual major red flags with the titanic submersible

first, stuff that people are clowning on that isn't actually a red flag at all

using starlink satcoms for their overall [surface] communications

the stupid game controller to steer

that being said. here is the fucked up design stuff that i notice

Where The Fuck Are The Chairs

they have had known issues with communication

[source: the independent]

[source: the independent]

in a power failure situation, they would have been SOL

[source: the independent]

something weird going on with their pressure hull

[source: nbc]

while it is "normal" for structures that are exposed to regular massive changes in pressure to have fatigue (imagine bending a piece of metal in and out over and over, eventually it will break-- you want to catch and replace that before it happens), it's weird to me that

they obviously have no "black box" system or any way to locate a missing vessel

[source: nyt]

Company Culture Is The Killer

complete disregard for safety is really what killed these people

[source: the independent]

obviously if this is your CEO your company culture is totally fucked. beyond saving. you do not have a regard for human life.

for reasons unknown they didn't flag the authorities that the vessel was missing for hours and hours

[source: the independent]

not that it likely would have helped to save these people if they had been alerted earlier, but it shows a desire to cover up mistakes

and like. obviously. you should get your shit inspected. nobody taking paying passengers anywhere should be allowed to be their own safety inspection authority.

the original sinking of the titanic was what led to SOLAS (safety of life at sea) rules being instituted. they've been updated several times since then, but they don't yet cover submersibles like this, since they are relatively new. it's likely that this incident will cause a new interest in updating the rules. as they say: every regulation is written in blood

*i'm a mechanical engineer who works in the maritime industry, but not like, a particularly related section of the industry-- i do shit with cargo containers mainly. no further info on my credentials will be given since i have no desire to doxx myself on tumblr dot edu. i've tried not to say anything too wrong or out of my depth in this post but my opinion is "guy with an engineering degree who reads news articles" level of informed. so take your maximum grains of salt

With the Titanic tourist submarine gone missing I would once again like to say that every single person on that ship that night got their family torn apart in some way. Survivors had to sit in lifeboats and listen to their love ones die in the water. Many survivors went on to have severe mental health issues and committed suicide. After the incident the White Star Line sent out bills to living relatives of their deceased employees making them pay for the uniforms that their loved ones had died in. The people in Halifax who had to recover the deceased bodies were traumatized for life while also paying for funeral services for unclaimed bodies with money out of their own pockets.

I 100 percent believe that it’s important to study the ship as it continues to deteriorate but in no way should it be used as a fucking tourist attraction and the fact that it’s gotten to this point is straight up disgusting. If one things goes wrong down there that it’s your dead. Simple as that.

Robert Ballard who discovered the ship has even said that he has regrets about discovering the ship because of the damage that submarines have caused to it.