We Shall Rise Again

I made a Draw This in Your Style <3 I will adore anyone's art from this 💙

Decided to give @star-stages 's DTIYS challenge a try! Been a while since I did a full render, so this was fun practice on a blorbo I absolutely adore.

DRAG THAT BOY DOWN HERE 🗣️🗣️🗣️

wanted to draw that new Sonic render! I think he turned out nice!

Og:

Crazy Sonamy take, but Reboot Archie Sonamy is Modern Sonamy if they were allowed to get together. It’s such an underrated version of the ship in my opinion. Like READ THIS STUFF.

The balance of Sonic being a bit more of a flirt with Amy’s lovey-dovey side works so well. Their characterizations here are the BEST balance of their game counterparts with a bit more freedom. Like Amy’s excitable and angry side along with Sonic’s more emotional and snarky side. While similar to the games, it’s different enough to be its own thing. Maybe I'm delusional but this is also how I’d love to see them written. Whether officially or in fanfiction. This is some good stuff!

Wtf is that thing

Wompoo fruit dove (Ptilinopus magnificus)

via @worldmage-girl

#ma'am is that your child next to you or is it an errant piece of dryer lint

Kingfisher and Great Egret lined up just right

Happy Anniversary. This is the original post. On this day in 2011 I was doing a charity drive for the natural disasters in Tōhoku and drew this. A few hours later I turned it into a gif and posted it here.

Here’s the original doodle before I drew it into a GIF

Happy 14th birthday Nyan Cat! The original post originated here on Tumblr

So a couple days ago, some folks braved my long-dormant social media accounts to make sure I’d seen this tweet:

And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.

So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years.  These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing.  They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it.  It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face.  Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing.  And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc.  NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.

Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres.  What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female.  I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one.  They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO.  If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone.  Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered.   I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.  

I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all.  I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole.  That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three.  And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.

And it changed the face of costuming.  People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries.  And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.  

So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart.  This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.  

(Oh, and for anyone wondering: yes, I’m over 40 now, and yes, I’m still making costumes. And that armor is still in great shape after 17 years in a hot attic!)  

Hang on a minute. I recognize the name “penwiper”. Let me check– Ok, yeah, I’ve heard of this person.

OP also invented armsocks.

OP I have been thinking about YOUR IMPACT since 2011. Do you know what you did for Homestuck lmao

WAIT

I JUST REMEMBERED HEARING AN ELON MUSK QUOTE WHERE HE TALKS ABOUT HOW HE BELIEVES CHESS IS "TOO SIMPLE" OR WHATEVER AND HE SAID HIS FAVORITE GAME WAS A GAME CALLED "POLYTOPIA"

I JUST REMEMBERED THAT IVE PLAYED POLYTOPIA

It being Elon's favorite game (or at least one so important to him that his biographer dedicates a lot of time to it) is.....really really funny.

Basically, imagine Civilization, but as a mobile game. So like if Civilization Revolution was even more dumbed down (that's a Civilization insult. That's devastating. It's devastated right now). For what it's worth, it's not a bad game. On the contrary, from what I could tell in the little bit of time I played it, it's a perfectly competent game with good design. But it's not a deep game by any means. I played through it once, won easily on my first go, then saw that the other playable characters had barely any differences between them.

Like, not to imply you can judge a book by its cover, but here's what it looks like

I came across an article by Dave Karpf discussing this exact thing, and I think it describes it wonderfully

i think it’s fucked up you can’t mod console games like. why can't I go online and download goth girl isabelle into my animal crossing game you’re not the boss of me.

An interesting facet of the whole US tariff situation from a tabletop publishing perspective is seeing exactly how many small-time US book printers who swore they were domestic manufacturers have been straight up lying to their clients and having their stuff printed overseas anyway, and are now caught in that lie.

characters going “we were lovers once”: eh, it’s okay i guess. it’s nice enough

characters going “we were friends once”: absolutely devastating. one hit knockout i’m gone

"We were comrades once." With tears in their eyes. Implies there was a common cause, they were on the same side, they fought toghether. Something corrupted/saved one, and there is no going back.

how i'm handling my students using AI to write papers:

-don't accuse them on using AI from the get-go and instead ask them to informally define all the huge words that they used in their essay which i know they don't know the meaning of

-ask to see their original file where they "wrote" the essay. go to version history to see if it was just copy and pasted and then just edited a bit. i keep an eye out for the shit like "certainly! here's an essay about...."

-if they own up to it, they can re-do the assignment for a higher grade even if there will be an automatic penalty. if they don't, i process it like plagiarism and get my supervisor involved.

And this is much better than the immediate accusations. Some students have a good vocabulary. Stop accusing them of faking their essays without proof, and this is a good way to check.

Fellow students please stop using AI, go back to promising not to kill the school nerd if they do all your homework or something.

I once heard this argument that people need to stop babyfying Tails and stop seeing him as the cute character because that’s what leads to him not being taken as seriously as the others and makes people just see him as a little guy who can’t really contribute in any way.

And to that I say, FUCK YOU! Cute characters can be taken seriously; Tails can be badass and adorable, and I say we need more of that. Have him just be the cutest little precious bean on the earth while breaking people’s noses. Have him literally fucking kill people with a little happy smile on his face that just makes you feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside. Make him bathe in the blood of his enemies before getting head pats from Sonic.

If we lived in an imagined idyllic age of days gone by, Sony would be running TV ads featuring a guy with frosted tips in a sports car saying shit like "switch 2? Try switching 2 Playstation instead" and he'd drive off and you see his car is full of beautiful women and twinks (it's woke) but they'd never do that these days

"oh why are the boys there why is it woke" I'm projecting cherry-picked pieces of modernity I personally find palatable onto my imagined idyllic past that's what makes it imagined and idyllic dipshit

Tbh I think fandom generally needs to get better at sitting with the uncomfortable fact that a story/fanwork/meme/whatever can hurt one person and help another

This is why I think “tag warning” culture is kinder and more constructive than cancel culture / “no problematic content” culture. One size does not fit all, but if we learn to be more aware of the fact that the same thing can be emotionally validating or cathartic to one person and upsetting to another, and pick up a general mindset of thinking before we post, “what might people need a heads up for in this content?”, we grow more compassionate, more thoughtful, and more understanding of the differences in people’s experiences.

[ID: a set of tags reading: #everyone has different needs or allergies #we don't remove all allergens from the world #we post an ingredients list /END ID]

thursday