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just according to keikaku*

@timetot / timetot.tumblr.com

*keikaku means plan. Claire. 28, they/she, white, ace & arospec, prone to falling in love with robots, superheroes, aliens, and total dorks. Multi-fandom: Doctor Who, Star Trek, Star Wars, & Supernatural, with a smattering of cartoons, comics, video games, horror movies, podcasts, tabletop RPGs, and other shows. I like a lot of horror media and I try to tag it appropriately, but please ask me to tag anything that's not a common trigger.
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"Star Trek Deep Space Nine already did this in the 90's. It's not as special or original as you think." I say loudly to be heard over the din of the sportsbar where a baseball game is playing on a TV.

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Reblogged boosstergold
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u call Booster michael im fr not listening bc his name is Booster Carter and thats literally how he refers to himself even before becoming a hero idc what retcons say we are 90s girls here. only reason "booster" is his hero name is because he was nervous and accidentally said his NAME instead of planned hero name (goldstar) when asked his first debut. I feel like ignoring that actually ignores something really important about him.

#booster gold#dc
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Reblogged aerialworms
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Deprecating New XKit

Hi all, it's been a while!

tl;dr: You should use XKit Rewritten, it's new, shiny, and getting consistent updates. Get it from here: https://addons.tumblr.com/post/661324873572974592/xkit-rewritten. If you want to customize the appearance of Tumblr you should use the built-in settings or Palettes for Tumblr. You shouldn't rely on New XKit, it's old and busted.

Around four years ago, April, a core contributor to New XKit, started the XKit Rewritten and wider @addons projects to create a modern alternative to the already somewhat moldy New XKit. This was with our complete support, and many members of the New XKit team now also help out with XKit Rewritten and other addons.

Chrome and Firefox have both phased out support for older extensions, requiring challenging workarounds to install New XKit. It's become very clear that anyone who is still using New XKit would really have a better time using XKit Rewritten, Palettes and Outbox for Tumblr, and the couple XKit-inspired core Tumblr features.

If you continue to use New XKit for some key part of your Tumblr workflow be warned that it's past the end of its digital lifespan. Despite the name, New XKit is a crumbling old cathedral. You can still walk around in it if you really want to, but it has been fenced off for safety and a brick might fall on your head.

One key difference we'd like to highlight is that XKit Rewritten intentionally doesn't have a Blacklist feature, leaving it to Tumblr's native post filtering functionality. If you still need the specific functionality of New XKit's Blacklist, you can keep it installed alongside XKit Rewritten. Click here for a list of other frequently asked questions.

To summarize: Get XKit Rewritten here: https://addons.tumblr.com/post/661324873572974592/xkit-rewritten. It's like New XKit but designed for modern Tumblr and consistently updated. New XKit will still be around for anyone who really needs it but is a much buggier experience.

Thank you all very much for using New XKit! On behalf of the whole team it's been a great time with all of you here on [tumblr].

#xkit
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Reblogged oxbowreality
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My feelings about queernormative worlds in SFF is that I can often enjoy it, but I rarely believe it.

Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.

So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)

Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.

Which is totally fine for people’s D&D games and cute oneshot comics and personal works and such, but when you want me to take your worldbuilding seriously, you’re going to have to convince me! And a lot of it is not convincing.

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Couple people taking this to mean I think every fantasy world should be heteronormative and homophobic, and no man I just want people’s worldbuilding to be more interesting because I love worldbuilding and also queerness.

Just… build your world around the story you want to tell, rather than dropping your story into Basically LOTR or Basically Star Wars or whatever.

A lot of people talking about Gay Arranged Marriage in the notes and I fully agree. It makes for a great example because if you just plop it into Standard MedievalEurope-esque Fantasy, But Everyone’s Cool With Gay People, it makes no sense at all! And like if you just want to write an arranged marriage royalty AU of your favorite M/M ship because you like the ship and you like the trope then whatever lol, but that is boring to me. (This is an opinion! It is not objective fact! It just appears to be one a bunch of you share.) The thing is, if you want to write Gay Arranged Marriage, there are SO many ways to make the world around it support what you want the vibe to be like! But it requires thinking about what arranged marriages are FOR.

Often this is in a royalty/nobility story. Generally, royals arrange marriages with other royals to produce heirs that tie the families together through bloodlines: both families are now invested in the well-being of the grandchild and less likely to go to war with each other. Kingdoms get unified, property gets consolidated, etc. If the characters in question are cis, gay arranged marriages can’t possibly be for that. Then why do it?

The question to ask is, well, what advantages could a prince NOT having children bring to his family? Then the options start opening up.

Maybe he’s a second or third child, and marrying him to a man means he can have no legitimate heirs to challenge the crown prince’s children. Maybe this is common practice to do with younger sons to prevent too many royal family branches vying for the throne, the way European royals might send younger sons into the clergy for the same purpose. Maybe it’s a form of soft disinheritance: yeah, we’ve decided we don’t want you to procreate. Maybe it’s the socially acceptable way of getting the first son who SHOULD inherit out of the way if the current king decides he is actually a bad fit for the throne and wants his younger son to inherit instead.

Or maybe a conquering kingdom demands the princes of the conquered kingdom marry men from their own court, a way of cutting off the opposing royal line while also basically creating hostages that still get proper treatment as royalty and disincentivizes the conquered kingdom from attacking back. Maybe this is a common way of flaunting your royal power and controlling conquered territories.

Or maybe you don’t want gay marriage to be “basically a punishment.” Maybe you want it to be celebrated and respected. Maybe you can have a kingdom that has a succession system similar to the Inca one: the emperor would choose which of his sons (or sometimes a nephew) would be the heir and become emperor, but that son didn’t inherit any wealth or land, the wealth and land got split up among the other sons. So the son who became emperor had the incentive to go out and conquer more lands and build his own court. (That’s how the Inca Empire grew so big so fast.)

Maybe your fantasy emperor is always same-sex married. After all, the emperor is an embodiment of the sun god and therefore divine perfection; (s)he should be married to an equally perfect spouse, which of course, to be equally perfect, must be the same gender. This also means the emperor has no children, and thus cannot show favoritism to their own genetic line; they must choose an heir from their nieces or nephews, or from the children of the people in their court or of the nobility. The heir will become the next emperor and be obligated to be same-sex married and have no children of their own either. This encourages everyone in the court to want to impress the emperor and show their loyalty, so they/their family might be chosen as heir. Boom, worldbuilding that supports The Emperor Is Always Gay Married. Then you start to ask the question, do nobles get more prestige if they get gay married like the emperor, in exchange for losing the chance to have children who might get chosen to be the next emperor? Is it prestigious for commoners to be gay married like the emperor, or is it kinda cringe like “oh you think you’re as good as the emperor,” or is it kinda sacrilegious like “oh you think you’re as good as the emperor”? Does that change if the kingdom is patriarchal, matriarchal, or if the emperor can choose a boy or a girl equally as their heir? Do two women married have more prestige when there is a female empress, and two men married have more prestige when there’s a male emperor? What kind of backstabbing court politics happen to get your preferred person chosen as heir?

Gay-normative fantasy setting ripe for gay royal arranged marriages! And introduces so many hooks on which to hang political intrigue plots! Maybe trans people have a special adulthood rites ceremony where the sun god burns away their old gender and imparts their new one and if a trans person is chosen as heir to the emperor they still have to be same gender married of course but now you have to make sure they have magic birth control and if necessary mandatory abortions because the emperor is Not Allowed To Have Children! You don’t need to be obsessed with pregnancy or bioessentialist or institutionally homophobic, you just have to think about how your setting works and why it works that way! It actually makes things MORE interesting when you do!

#stories
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Reblogged quasi-normalcy
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So far in LA an Australian news reporter has been shot in the leg by a rubber bullet, a British reporter has been shot by a sponge bullet and sent to the hospital for emergency surgery. A NY Post reporter has been shot in the head with a rubber bullet and went to the hospital for a large bruise on his forehead, whiplash and neck pain, and CNN reporters were handcuffed and escorted away being told to not come back or they will be arrested BECAUSE they are reporters.

It seems like all reporters there to give the real story are being targeted by police/ICE/military in LA.

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I DEEPLY appreciate dedication to the truth. Thank you.

#us politics
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Quick GIF tutorial (Photoshop)

#holy shit this is perfection!!#i am so jealous of this set!#the coloring op THE COLORING!!! (original post)

alright @dontyouknowemma-itsyou and anyone interested, this was really easy to colour so I'm gonna give you a quick breakdown. (i didn't save the psd file?? so i'm redoing this i guess, but i did it on autopilot in the first place. i've been making gifs for over 15 years.)

GONNA INCLUDE A VIDEO AT THE END SHOWING OFF THE SETTINGS!!

General GIF stuff

  1. This is in Photoshop CC. I extract a clip from a video as an MP4 file, which photoshop can open. (I use AviDemux for this, which is free, because it lets you save clips using 'copy' encoding for video output and still change from MKV to MP4 format - without losing any video quality, cause you're not re-encoding.)
  2. Open that shit directly in photoshop as a video layer (just drag and drop), that lets you scan through it to check the colouring works overall. Convert the video layer to Smart Object, that lets you resize and edit it. (Do NOT open a full movie in Photoshop, it'll probably die and it has a max length anyway.)
  3. Also all the colour adjustments are gonna be adjustment layers you can tweak and turn on/off whenever. There's a lil button at the bottom of the Layers window to add them quickly.
  4. When we're done we're choosing a section of the video in the Timeline window and we're doing File->Export->Save For Web. 'Adaptive' (or selective) palette selection, 'pattern' style dithering.

Colouring

  1. Curves layer to lighten. Just pull the curve up. Curves seem to give a much smoother lightening, since it mostly affects the middle, leaving the brights and the darks where they are.
  2. Levels to make the darkest darks pure black, and the lightest lights pure white. Good for limiting GIF size. Don't overdo it though.
  3. Colour balance!! My beloved, most important. So for the Shadows and Highlights, you're gonna move the sliders towards Cyan and Blue, but for the Midtones you're gonna do the opposite - towards Red and Yellow. This means you don't shift the overall colour of the picture, but trust me it does SO MUCH for the contrast and colour. I swear I do this for almost any edit, and also my art tbh. Also if the original clip is like very green or whatever, you can correct that here.
  4. Selective colour. For this I did one thing. For 'Black' dropdown, I upped 'black' and 'yellow' sliders (the latter to counteract the blue in the darks). This in combination with:
  5. Levels again. Bring in those darks, turn them pure black. Basically this does a couple things. It preserves GIF file size, by making sure the dark areas are static (file sizes mostly depends on pixels that are CHANGING). It ALSO makes the palette much more optimized, meaning you don't waste palette on the darks no one sees anyway, and instead uses them in the mid range colour variation, giving much smoother gradients. That's it!! That's all the colouring!!

Other tips and tricks

  1. Often I'll put a Smart Sharpen (50% amount, 0,5px radius) filter on the video layer, just to make it a bit crisper. Subtle but effective.
  2. You can manually edit the palette when you save as a GIF, either to reduce file size, or because some colour areas look pixelly. See the video for how.
  3. If your file size is huge but you don't want to shorten or resize, you can reduce the frame rate manually. To do this, FIRST save the GIF, then open the GIF you just saved. Go through in the Timeline window (which is now a Frame Animation rather than a Video Timeline), select every other frame, and delete them. When you do this, remember to select the rest of the frames and double their Frame Delay so you don't end up with a super speedy GIF. (You can also make a GIF slow-mo like this.)
  4. Since the video is a smart object, I literally just resized it in between saving the different GIFs, to change composition between the different shots.
  5. Selective Colour layer can be used for a lot of image tweaking. For example, if something is overly yellow or green, I may go to the Yellow and Green in dropdown and just reduce the yellow slider. (I usually then go to Red in dropdown and ADD some yellow to that, to balance out the reds to be less pink.) Or maybe the overall colours are nice but the blues are dull, so I'll just go to Blue/Cyan and tweak those specifically.
  6. If you have a colouring you like that you want to use on lots of things, remember you can drag-and-drop layers between different images. You can also save a photoshop file with nothing but those layers, to use on later gifs and just tweak as needed. (You can also make Actions to automate stuff, but I won't go into that.)
  7. How easy or hard something is to colour HUGELY depends on the original video, both lighting/colouring and video quality.

Finally the video showing settings!

This is like 5 minutes long and has no commentary or anything. This is mostly to show off where you find each individual thing, and what difference it makes in the colouring.

ANYWAY hope someone found this useful!!! ♥

#gif making#photoshop#ref
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Tagged by @kerfanna to do blog vs. blogger! Fun!

Tagging: @colesabi @silvercap @vizishereig @samblerambles give me one second I’ll put the picrew link in the comments

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Ohhh this is cute!!

I think this looks at least something like me haha

Tagging @spinitback @thebrandywine @birdycage and @phoenixmetaphor if any of you are interested ^_^

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woww

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this should be the correct link!

I taggggggg @flurrin @strands-of-starlight @fonulyn and anyone else who wants in :]

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@muffintheoverlord @snailcomicz @snorlaxlovesme @delta-hexagon and anyone else who's first instinct on seeing this post was to do the picrew right away!

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#picrew
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