place for thoughts

Let's take a moment to appreciate just how amazing the title cards were for Batman the Animated Series.

Oh! I actually know what made these look so iconic!

The backgrounds for the entire series were done on black paper, a first for any animated show. It's Batman, which means everything is at night and incredibly dark. So, the majority of the backgrounds were going to be black anyways and using black paper would cut down on the time it took to create all of the backgrounds. Adding color over the black paper instead of the traditional method gave it a much more stylized look that helped make it iconic.

It also forced some other creative choices, such as using an airbrush to do all of the background art. During the early testing, they found that using an airbrush was easier to apply paint with than a paintbrush and that it looked better. Airbrushing let them be more experimental with painting techniques, such as the spattery fades you can see in the "Bane" and "Deep Freeze" title cards above or the soft, deeply shadowed face on "the Last Laugh." The overall effect of airbrushing on a black background is a much darker, moodier vibe than could be achieved with a traditional approach.

They cared very deeply about the art of the show and how they were going to create it. It wasn't just about the story or the character. In the words of co-creator Eric Radomski: "As opposed to making shows just to sell toys, we've made quality films."

I've wanted to do @shiftythrifting fanart for years, so I decided to combine it with my current brainrot to give Astarion this truly wretched (affectionate) outfit.

Resources:

the girls...

I saw a post saying that Boromir looked too scruffy in FotR for a Captain of Gondor, and I tried to move on, but I’m hyperfixating. Has anyone ever solo backpacked? I have. By the end, not only did I look like shit, but by day two I was talking to myself. On another occasion I did fourteen days’ backcountry as the lone woman in a group of twelve men, no showers, no deodorant, and brother, by the end of that we were all EXTREMELY feral. You think we looked like heirs to the throne of anywhere? We were thirteen wolverines in ripstop.

My boy Boromir? Spent FOUR MONTHS in the wilderness! Alone! No roads! High floods! His horse died! I’m amazed he showed up to Imladris wearing clothes, let alone with a decent haircut. I’m fully convinced that he left Gondor looking like Richard Sharpe being presented to the Prince Regent in 1813

And then rocked up to Imladris a hundred ten days later like

Some people have been wondering about the raccoon. Listen. Listennn. Don't ask about the raccoon.

But does the racoon survive the Uruk-Hai? Does he curl up on Aragorn's head, or does he go straight to Faramir? Does he bite Denethor?

My friend. My colleague. My brother my captain my king. I too have been pondering this question, and in my mind there can be only one ultimate outcome.

A few months later

All hail the High Warden of Gondor.

Epilogue: It ADORES Faramir.

Continue✨ Keep going✨

Thank you, lady 🤗

The Nigerian accent. God. She reminds me of home...

Always grateful when this makes the rounds

Something that literally changed my life was working with a friend on a coding thing. He was helping me create an auto rig script and was trying to explain something to me but his words were just turning into static in my brain. I was tired and confused and there was so many new concepts happening.

I could feel myself working toward a crying meltdown and was getting preemptively ashamed of what was about to happen when he said, “Hey, are you someone who benefits from breaks?”

It broke me.

Did I benefit from breaks? I didn’t know. I’d never taken them.

When a problem frustrated or upset me I just gritted my teeth and plowed through the emotional distress because eventually if you batter and flail at something long enough you figure it out. So what if you get bruised on the way.

I viscerally remembered in that moment being forced to sit at the table late into the night with my dad screaming at me, trying to understand math. I remembered taking that with me into adulthood and having breakdowns every week trying to understand coding. I could have taken a break? Would it help? I didn’t know! I’d never taken one!

“Yes,” I told him. We paused our call. I ate lunch. I focused on other stuff for half an hour. I came back in a significantly better state of mind, and the thing he’d been trying to explain had been gently cooking in the back of my head and seemed easier to understand.

Now when I find myself gritting my teeth at problems I can hear his gentle voice asking if I benefit from breaks. Yes, dear god, yes why did I never get taught breaks? Why was the only way I knew to keep suffering until something worked?

I was relating to this same friend recently my roadtrip to the redwoods with my wife. “We stopped every hour or so to get out and stretch our legs and switch drivers. It was really nice. When I was a kid we’d just drive twelve hours straight and not stop for anything, just gas. We’d eat in the car and power through.”

He gave a wry smile, immediately connecting the mindset of my parents on a road trip to what they’d instilled in me about brute forcing through discomfort. “Do you benefit from breaks?” he echoed, drawing my attention to it, making me smile with the same sad acknowledgement.

Take breaks. You’re allowed. You don’t have to slam into problems over and over and over, let yourself rest. It will get easier. Take. Breaks.

[“Much has been written about Li’s older boyfriend, Magnus Hirschfeld. He was a closeted German doctor and sexologist who became famous in the 1930s as a defender of gay people. In books on Hirschfeld, Li is usually just a footnote.

But as I found in my research, Li was a sexologist and activist in his own right. And in my view, his ideas about sexuality speak to our moment better than his much more well-known boyfriend’s do.

When Li died in Vancouver in 1993, his unpublished manuscript about sexuality was thrown in the trash. Luckily, it was rescued by a curious neighbor and eventually ended up in an archive. Since then, only a handful of people, myself included, have read it.

(…)

Yet Li’s rediscovered manuscript shows he did become a sexologist, even though he never published his findings.

In his manuscript, Li tells how after Hirschfeld died, he spent decades traveling the world, carrying on the research and taking detailed notes while living in Zurich, Hong Kong and then Vancouver.

The data he gathered would have startled Hirschfeld. Forty percent of people were bisexual, he wrote, 20 percent were homosexual and only 30 percent percent were heterosexual. (The last 10 percent were “other.”) Being trans was an important, beneficial part of the human experience, he added.

Hirschfeld thought bisexuals were scarce and that even homosexuals were only a minor slice of the population—a “sexual minority.” To Li, bisexuals plus homosexuals were the majority. It was lifelong heterosexuals who were rare—so rare, he wrote, that they “should be classified as an endangered species.”]

Story concept: A gang of women who have gathered together and hang out due to having a similar background - none of them were originally people. They're all different variations of Mythical Fairytale Lady That A Man Almost Married, and they were all kind of stranded here in a human form after the man who wanted them discovered that actually she isn't any easier or any more pliable than natural human women.

The selkie and the swan maiden who both had their coats stolen, but neither of them is delicate or graceful. The swan maiden is exactly as swans are - she's dignified for as long as she's allowed to do as she pleases, but her response to being inconvenienced is First Of All How Dare You, Infinite Wing Smack Attack. The selkie was never going to be a good housewife either, she's lazy and goofy and refuses to take anything seriously. She likes following swan maiden around and watching her terrorise people. They bond over a mutual interest in flooding the bathroom and honking at people.

The celtic fae who wasn't tricked by a human man into marrying him, as a matter of fact her ex-husband insists that she tricked him. She's the only one who actually married the man who seduced her, which she did 100% just for the shits and giggles, and because Fae Divorce Court is an absolutely hilarious shitshow. And much like the selkie is paired with the swan maiden, the fae is close friends with the kitsune, who also voluntarily took a human form out of a trickster's desire to fuck with people, and enjoys hanging out with the fae just to see what kind of utter chaotic bullshit she comes up with.

the wenis is a dance

(thanks to tiktok user @thatbaroneboy for the amazing compilation!)

A performance by 蔡宏毅 (Cai Hongyi), whose specialty is sword dance.

living with ADHD is being stuck in a Matrix of your own making, and forgetting you made it

Official Time Loop Post

A Baldur’s Gate playthrough idea:

Make everyone in your party / camp a ranger druid. Make sure they’re the beast master subclass for ranger.

Everyone summons a bear and then shapeshifts into one. Then when you go out on your adventures, you’re just one big pack of bears no one wants to fuck with.

fucking weirdos (endearingly)

my spy oc Victor and his annoying pet knife

❗"Dagger mimic" is designed by @pocketss