"Why don't people recognize Link in TOTK" bc everyone imagines the legendary swordsman to be built like Ganondorf and Link doesn't bother correcting anyone bc being hailed as a hero is like on the bottom of his priorities, which are topped by things like "Bake one of every pie"

Rando farmer: They say that once the noble hero of legend passed by this very village! Isn't that wonderful to imagine, genderfluid stranger?

Link, 5'6" with 2" heels and wearing a backless dress suspiciously stained with blood: no yeah that's wild

"Wouldn't they recognize him bc he's with Zelda" Everyone interacting with Zelda was like "Wow, the princess!! The princess who saved Hyrule is here, talking to us! Plus some guy with three sets of pronouns who's building a bomb but more importantly The Princess!! Wow!!"

Hey it’s the princess and that non-binary war criminal!

Guy certainly knows about it

Everyone gets “The 90s” look wrong so let’s fix it

If you weren’t here for part one, lemme sum it up real fast:

Okay, all up to speed? We’re being served 80s throwback stuff with the serial numbers scratched off, re-labeled as yo totally 90s. What we’ve got now isn’t completely wrong, but I’m telling you, there’s so much gold left unmined.

As we saw in part one with Memphis Milano, these things get messy. Trends don’t start and end neatly every ten years. The first wave of 90s throwback attempts focused on the early part of the decade, and nobody since really pushed to represent the other seven years. Well, if you really wanna do something, I guess you gotta do it yourself.

I have suggestions. Get your flannel ready, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

Analog Grunge

SURRRRRRRGE or uh, Grunge, is probably the look that defines the decade best. The big kickoff point here is Nirvana - after a shiny pop-dominated music scene in the 80s, Nevermind was like a breath of fresh smog.

Your design has to look like it survived a nuclear blast, then was run over by your parents’ Buick a couple of times.

If there’s a Comic Sans for the 90s, it’s “distressed typewriter font.” Seriously, it’s mandatory. When I pulled images for this post I could not escape typewriter fonts. I don’t think you couldn’t call yourself a respectable designer without it. Just look at how much mileage old-timey typewriters and label makers got:

Hell, it’s the giant X in The X Files!

I think another component to Grunge is sort of an anti-digital, pro-analog message. My pet theory is home computers went from being a semi-common novelty in 1990 to an essential gotta-have-it purchase in every American home by ‘99. Desktop publishing apps made it almost too easy to make pixel-perfect, clean, uniform designs. Digital photography and scanners meant you could now publish full color photographs with ease.

But digital perfection is the enemy of Grunge. Analog means authenticity.

So you had a whole gaggle of designers running in the other direction. Sure you could use a computer, but your work absolutely had to look like it didn’t come from one. As much as possible, incorporate hand-drawn artwork, scribbles, dust and splotches. Write text with chicken scratch if you have to. As much as you could make your multimillion dollar ad campaign look like it came from the margins of some high schoolers’ math homework, the better.

Factory Pomo

Not everyone was running away from digital, though. Many designers were embracing computer apps - and I think that’s where Factory Pomo first came into being. Coined by designer Froyo Tam (that’s their logo up above!) Factory Pomo is one of those things that once you see an example, you can’t stop seeing it.

Want your logo to look futuristic and modern? Stick it in a circle and put some triangles around. Invert half the colors, then another half.

Max Krieger has a great writeup on the probable inflection point: Tomorrowland. As the story goes, Tomorrowland at Disney - the part of the park meant to look like it’s from the future - would very quickly look very outdated each time they tried to update it. Instead, in 1994 they decided to own being outdated. They came up with a ridiculously fun “timeless” futuristic look, mixing industrial design with Jules Verne. Factory Pomo’s signature was all over the blueprints.

The look quickly escaped the theme park and was especially prevalent in the booming mid 90s home computer market. It’s the Packard Bell cyborg, it’s the logo in Video Toaster. If you caught that The X Files logo earlier is both Factory Pomo with the tall type and X in a ring AND Grunge with the typewriter X in the background, you win 5 bonus Pogs. 

And it’s a stretch, but one could draw a line between Factory Pomo’s inverted black and whites and the Ska movement’s two-tone checkerboards. Maybe. Possibly. I’d have to call Tony Hawk to double check. 

Back to Froyo Tam for a second, but that bit about them coining the term? That was in 2017. “Factory Pomo” didn’t have a name for like… 25 years. How’s that possible, you may wonder? Weren’t designers following a defined style? Well, yes and no. I think people were designing stuff to look a certain way, but it’s less a game of “this is what the aesthetic looks like” and more like a game of telephone.

If you do an architecture tour in a major city, you’ll learn that every building and skyscraper is classified to a specific architectural movement. Every building that is but ones built in the last 20-30 years. Newer buildings have to wait a few decades for official classification. Historians need time and perspective to figure out what emerging trends in architecture are going on, whose work influenced who, that sort of thing.

Designing a logo for Slim Jims or Cherry Coke takes considerably less time than constructing a skyscraper, but I think the same principle holds true. It’s really difficult to tell what’s a trend and what’s a fad when you’re living in the moment. I couldn’t tell you what’s the defining aesthetic for the 2020s right now. It’ll be obvious in 2053, but right now, no clue.

Enough time has passed between the nineties and today that we can pick this stuff apart easily. Maybe if you’re lucky, you can be the first to classify these design movements, too.

Working on a part three! I’ll look into a few other trends and address the big question– Is the Y2K aesthetic actually a 90s thing? More to come.

*A ton of these examples above are from the CARI Institute, which you should totally check out, they’ve been cataloging this stuff for years.

I would chase you to the ends of the world

when brains r like "today i will not brain" my brother in christ you are a brain

this went from 13K to 15K in two days flat, is everybody... okay?

Brain not braining.

Source

this is so fucking funny i don't even care if it's real

[ID: A reddit post reading, “I (37M) live with my wife (37F) and son and daughter (9 and 11 respectively).

Recently, there has been this kid who comes by our house after playing soccer and either rides his bike or walks over the lawn with his cleats on his way home.

It started out as me giving him stern looks whenever I saw him, then it slowly progressed to me asking him to just go around.

The last time I asked him to stop he made a point to stomp extra hard and twist his feet in to the grass to piss me off.

Since then Ive just been hosing him. The first time I sprayed him with the hose he ran off, but then for some reason he just started standing there while I hose him like he enjoys it.

Its now progressed to me sitting on my lawn chair pointing my hose at him, and him just staring at me while he does so. Sometimes we even make small talk.

Im ngl, it started off as a really bitter relationship, but Ive actually gotten to know the kid quite well, we talk for maybe 15-20 mins everyday, and he doesnt seem to mind being hosed down after sweating hard playing soccer.

He comes by daily and we just shoot the shit while I hose him and he stands there for a bit.

Wife told me I need to stop, even after I explained it to her she said Im making us look like childish idiots.

I guess I could stop, but honestly its really funny waiting for him to come by and I see no harm in it. WIBTA?”

The second image is a comment on the post saying, “Is he the right age to get along with your kids? Maybe have them out chit-chatting and getting a hose down as well.” The OP responded, “hes my friend, my kids have enough of their own.” /end ID]

sorry but this ai expansion of the descartes portrait is literally so swagful

watching this 2h documentary on the history of half life and this dude takes a break in the middle of arizona to talk about one time he did magic shrooms backstage at a comedy club and thought he was having an auditory hallucination where he kept hearing the hl1 scientist voice talking to him only to peek at the stage google the guy on it and find out it was the original VA for kleiner doing a bit at the same club

Has anyone got that massively fucked up article written by someone who was hired to give a private talk to rich fucks about like global disasters but then it ended up being these rich fucks asking how to like, hire security to prevent looters and stop their own security from turning on them in a world with no money, and one dude mentioned shock collars and shit? You know?

Found it

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/23/tech-industry-wealth-futurism-transhumanism-singularity

yeah sorry i just don't think i can make it out tonight. i have to pick up my wife from her murder trial.

yes of course she did it. why do you think i married her.

I bet in the 20s all the weird German emo girls were thirsting after the Somnambulist

German emo girls be like “ich will 😍🥺”

Don’t hide this magnificent piece of info in the tags.

The bloke (Conrad Veidt) was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism, and when he refused to divorce his wife (who was Jewish), Joseph Goebbels had him blacklisted.

He also donated tons and tons of money to poor children who had been negatively effected by the Blitz in London after he moved to the US, following his becoming a naturalised-British citizen after leaving Germany in the 1930s.

Don’t forget that in 1919, he starred in “Different from the Others”, a German film protesting the anti-homosexuality laws in place. It’s widely regarded as the first pro-gay film. Conrad Veidt was a goddamn hero.

I just feel like this pic is relevant to the discussion

He was also the highest paid member of the cast in “Casablanca” (where he played a Nazi officer, again), even if he only got second billing, because he was THAT big a star.

He and his first wife divorced after… well she said it better than I ever could.

“I excused a lot of his failings and whims because I loved him. But one day he did something to me that I couldn’t forgive. I was singing that evening at the cabaret. I left him home and he told me: “I invited a few friends; we’ll dine while we wait for you.” And it just so happened I had received a new dress from Paris. That evening, after work, I arrived home and what do I see? All these gentlemen dressed as women. And Conrad had put on my Paris dress. At this point, I divorced!”

And as  Anita Loos put it

“Any Berlin lady of the night might turn out to be a man; the prettiest girl on the street was Konrad [sic] Veidt.”

Good to see the tumblr sexyman precludes even tumblr

It’s important to mention, I think, that he served in WWI on the Eastern front. He became I’ll in the trenches and while recovering joined up with the theater his girlfriend worked for, and spent his recuperation putting on plays for the troops.

He also believed in spiritualism and thought that he himself was a medium.

He was sexy man, Betty Grable, and Alistair Crowley all at once. So…no wonder tumblr likes him so much.

I was unaware of his existence until just now but this is amazing.

However since Crowley was an antisemitic malicious selfish bastard I’d have to say he was the opposite of Crowley.

Fair point. Didn’t know much about Crowley, just that he invented tarot cards and popularized them. I personally stay well away from all of that nonsense. Alright, let’s amend it to a benevolent psychic witch or something. As you like it.

Veidt’s role as Grand Vizier Jafar in “The Thief of Baghdad” (1940) was the inspiration for Disney’s version in the animated “Aladdin”. 

His makeup as Gwynplaine in “The Man Who Laughs” (1928) was the inspiration for The Joker.

And his role as Cesare The Somnambulist in “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari” (1919) was the inspiration for Tim Burton’s…

Well, look at him.

Some tips from fellow artist

STOP! Let the little penguin cross your dash he has places to go.

I just sat here and waited for a pixel penguin to waddle across my screen, AND I WOULD DO IT AGAIN

human pet guy is also very good on twitter