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nothing in particular

@alstroemeric / alstroemeric.tumblr.com

call me greenie
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Y'know, putting aside the potential a-/acephobic reasons, and the "not relying on overused romance tropes/shortcuts" reasons, I think one of the big reasons (that I haven't really seen talked about?) that Good Omens gets accused of queerbaiting is that it's basically the story of an existing relationship. It's not the story of how Aziraphale and Crowley fall in love, or admit that they're in love, or whatever that people tend to expect out of romance stories these days, at least, not in the traditional sense. Yes, technically we get to see their relationship develop and we do get to see them realizing and admitting to themselves that they are in love and that the other loves them back, but that's not really the main focus the way it is in a lot of stories where romance is involved. There's no "will they/won't they" drama, there's no big confession or relationship-affirming kiss or anything, because they've been in a developing relationship for nearly all of 6000 years. That's like, literally what the Arrangement is. It's their relationship, their "basically married", their "involved", their "together but we can't say it outright bc people are watching and also we don't wanna screw it up". And people aren't used to seeing that in stories about relationships (seriously, find me one example of a story where the main, endgame couple is together at the beginning and the plot doesn't revolve entirely around them having issues that they need to work out. Hollywood/the publishing industry is allergic to writing about healthy relationships that stay healthy and in tact and exist after they get together). So when they see Neil Gaiman say "it's a love story" they expect the story of Azi and Crowley falling in love and finally admitting it to themselves and each other and having a big climactic kiss to seal the deal. And when they get a couple who is basically married in everything but name, who have been together for 6000 years but have had to be so so careful and dance around their feelings bc ~bureaucracy~, who don't need a big kiss at the end, just a loving, tender look because they can finally relax and be in love together... it doesn't feel like enough to them. They were so busy looking for the "getting together" plot that isn't really there that they missed the love story that was there. Which is a shame honestly, because it really is an excellent love story. There's enemies to lovers and mutual pining and almost a sort of courtly love situation going on and it's excellent. And people don't see it because it's not what they were looking for.

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megpie71

The love story in Good Omens is also a very queer love story.  It’s the story of two people who have a relationship which exists in every single way except the official one.  And the fun thing is, it was one of those in the original book as well.  It’s a love story countless non-heterosexual people lived for decades, centuries even, and it’s a love story a lot of non-heterosexual people are still living today.  It’s just instead of saying “oh, no, they’re Just Good Friends”, the televisual version of Good Omens actually commits to the truth and says: “they love one another, very very much, and they aren’t allowed to do anything about it, because if they do, they’re going to wind up being flung out of their families and their jobs and their homes, and never allowed to return”.  (Never mind the families, jobs and homes they’d be thrown out of were each as dysfunctional as the other.  That isn’t the point: the point is this was their family, their job, their home and they didn’t know whether they’d be able to replace it.  Don’t belittle the risk until you’ve taken it). 

No wonder a lot of the heterosexual folks didn’t understand what they were looking at.  I think the part which is simultaneously both tragic and inspiring is there were a lot of non-heterosexual people who also couldn’t recognise it... because it wasn’t an experience they had any knowledge of.

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calware

PSA

avoid conforming to traditional gender norms by avoiding this common palette:

try using these palettes instead!!

Not to be mean but they’re right. None of these would ever fit together

They’re DISGUSTING, op. I’m sorry, it’s better you hear it here than have your grandma say she likes your clothes.

i actually disagree! not to bring back a certain children's hospital and say "it's literally color theory" unironically, but... it's literally color theory. both of these color palettes are virtually complimentary and look pretty nice together

youve got reds, greens, and blues:

and purples, blues, yellows, and oranges:

(you'll have to click on the images to see the full thing, i don't want to put them one after the other and make this post even longer than it already is. sorry for the low resolution im doing this on my phone)

of course there's variation in the values and saturation, but imo that's a bit of a given ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

wait actually fuck this post. what the hell is going on between you two

not to re-rail a post that OP himself intentionally derailed but I wanted to try out the palettes. The first one is made with the Girl Colors with no changes made to the values/saturation.

i think its ok. 

The second one I tweaked the saturation and values a to my liking. Both are very low effort but as you can see I kinda got into the second one. Anyway I really like orange/purple/yellow as a color scheme so I had fun with this 

this post was made less than 24 hours ago

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The thing that gets me about a lot of pseudoscientific medicine is the baffling way in which they view the human body.

It isn’t the inaccuracy that gets to me; we have a long history of just fucking guessing how the body works. It’s not even the extreme simplicity of their models. It’s how vulnerable they seem to think it is.

I mean, the skin is a barrier. It keeps stuff in and it keeps stuff out. Yes, there is some limited permeability; if you smear the right kinds of things on your skin then a little bit will get into your body (this is how topical anaesthetics work, and why we wear gloves in chemical labs). But some people are like “smooth this acai berry cream on your skin to boost your immune system!” [note: you DO NOT WANT to boost your immune system], or “put a raw potato under your armpit to draw to toxins out of your body!” or some shit. I look at those foot bath things that fill up with yellow rust as you use them and people go, “all that yellow stuff is the toxins being drawn out through your feet!” and I am horrified at their mental model for how the body works. They know your insides are protected by skin, right? Right?? If I thought my body was that permeable I’d wear a hazmat suit at all times. What if I touch some mud that’s got Toxins in it and they all get absorbed into my body? What if I use the wrong root vegetable under my armpit and it sucks all the vitamins out of my blood instead? That’s terrifying!

“Drink alkaline water every morning to keep your blood pH high!” Friend, how vulnerable is your blood to pH changes? You know that a fairly small variation can kill you?? If I thought this worked I’d never eat fermented foods again. I’d never clean with vinegar in case my Super Permeable Frog Skin absorbed all the acid into my blood and I died of acidemia.

“This essential oil gives you energy! This one boosts your immune system!” They’re for smells! They make smells! In your view, how much of my metabolism and immune regulation are dependent on what my environment smells like?? Am I going to die because I bought the Strawberry Surprise scented candle instead of sandalwood and my body forgot how to make ATP?? What???

The extreme fragility that they perceive in the human body, with apparently no barriers or regulatory mechanisms, vulnerable to such tiny changes in diet and environment, would terrify me. If I thought of the body like this I would never leave the house.

That… that is the least useful and most difficult to extract part of aloe vera

Why would you not just put the aloe vera fluid in. The part that has known soothing properties as a topical ointment that you could trick buyers into thinking would somehow help with hair. The part that you can just squish right out of the cut leaves. Slathering DNA on stuff doesn’t do anything and it’s so much more fiddly to extract and keep stable. I am so confused.

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romansroys

i personally find it very funny when an actual sitting president calls a fox news reporter a "stupid son of a bitch" no matter the context

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Someone once said that the titles of jane austen’s novels are the name of the problems in the books. For example: in pride and prejudice the biggest problem is the conflict between pride and prejudice. So that makes Emma the biggest problem in Emma and, now that I have started reading the novel, I have never agreed more with something than I agree with this.

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idle Jaskier-related notion:

Joey Batey is really approximately the same size and shape as Henry Cavill, and there are a number of clever techniques in pretty much all Jaskier's costumes to hide this fact and make him look about three or four inches narrower than he actually is. The costumers work really really hard to make him look that twinky, often with cleverly cut shoulder decorations that pretend he's trying to look bigger than he is and have the actual effect of making him look a lot lighter.

On a Doylistic level this makes sense, because it's hard to make Geralt look Huge and Imposing next to your non-combatant harmless sidekick if said sidekick is a jacked six foot burly man.

On a Watsonian level, however, the notion of Jaskier as this big meaty dude aggressively arguing with all his tailors to ensure that he looks as non threatening and foppish and entertaining as possible while also looking as sexy as he can (for a Jaskier definition of sexy, at least) is generating considerable entertainment for me this fine morning.

"No! My shoulders must look slender!"

"But, sir, you could look ripped!"

"Absolutely not! I must look slim and gentle and unassuming!"

"As you wish, sir... So do you wish it to be cut with much excess fabric, so that you look small and also very wealthy to afford so much?"

[howling] "No! I must look slender and gentle and also above else very attractive!"

Geralt doesn't notice any of this until they try to share a tiny hostel bed on the road and Jaskier cuddles up to him and abruptly there is no more room in that bed

I need a full picture costume run down of this by someone in the fashion field stat

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redhorsedawn

Ask and ye shall receive! I may not work in the fashion field but I do work in the costume production industry for theatre/film so this is totally my area. Using clothes to change someone’s appearance is super common, and Tim Aslam’s costume design for The Witcher is actually a really good example of this, so buckle up because this is a long ride!

Creating an illusion like this has two main components: shape (the style lines created by the clothes), and fit (the way the clothes hang on the person’s body), and is the result of close collaboration between the designer and the production team. 

We’re going to talk about season one, because that’s where the difference is the most obvious. Take a look at Geralt:

First, let’s talk about shape. The goal here is to make Geralt look strong and imposing, and the best way to do that is to exaggerate the triangle of his upper torso. See how much broader his shoulders look than his waist in both images? A loose shirt over tight pants is a classic way to establish this, because the shirt blousing at the waist (note that the pants sit high up at the natural waist) makes the hips looks narrower in comparison. Note also that his shirt has an asymmetrical closure - a centered vertical line down the shirt would make him looks slimmer, while the off-center one adds width.

His armor does this by giving him those massive shoulder pieces, which both lengthen and raise his shoulder line. I would estimate that they raise Henry Cavill’s shoulder line by a good two inches just from the bulk of the leather alone. His torso armor also does a really clever thing by having a very subtle V shape to the vertical lines, making his waist look smaller. If you count the number of stripes above and below his belt (again, sitting high at the natural waist), you’ll notice that the narrow stripe at the front edge of the armscye disappears, which allows the side stripes to make that V shape.

Now let’s talk about fit. The fit of Geralt’s shirt looks simple but is actually super specific. It’s very easy for an actor to get lost in a shirt that is too loose - if there’s too much extra fabric then it will just make the actor look smaller by drawing attention to how baggy it is. This shirt fits just right: the sleeves are full enough to allow for movement but still relatively fitted (and rolling up the sleeves actually also helps add breadth to Geralt’s torso by continuing the horizontal line at his waist). The body of the shirt fits smoothly across the shoulders and chest, and has just enough fullness to drape at the waist without feeling baggy.

Now let’s look at Jaskier.

We’ll start with this look. Shape and fit are very interconnected here so it’s just gonna be a jumble. First thing I notice: the jacket. Unlike your traditional fantasy/historical doublet, all of Jaskier’s jackets end at the waist, rather than continuing into a peplum/skirt like Geralt’s armor does. This cropped jacket is evocative of childhood/immaturity, an association that is generally considered to have its roots in schoolboy uniforms of the 19th and early 20th century (see the image of schoolboys wearing “Eton Jackets” below)

Jaskier also tends to wear his jackets open. This creates a vertical line down his torso, which is generally slimming, but it also totally obscures the shape of his torso. The brain is going to take the line of his hip, which we can see, and the armscye of his jacket, (which actually looks to be cut ever so slightly artificially narrow but it’s hard to tell) and fill in a line between them, which is likely going to end up being slightly narrower than his actual ribcage. He does have poofs at the top of his sleeves, which can be a technique used to add width, but if they’re cut and fit carefully you can actually hide some of the breadth of the shoulders inside the poof and make it look like the fullness comes from the poof and not the body.

Note: the “armscye” is the technical name for the armhole, but specifically the torso part. The corresponding sleeve part is the “sleevehead.”

Again, we have another open jacket, this one with strong vertical lines. See how the line of Jaskier’s hip flows up through the edge of the doublet all the way up through the armscye? This makes his torso look narrower despite the jacket’s shoulder tabs. In contrast, this line is always broken on Geralt’s outfits, whether at the waist with his shirt or with the giant shoulder pieces with his armor. Jaskier’s pants also tend to fit more loosely, which de-emphasizes the triangle of his shoulders to waist.

Okay this is my favorite image to illustrate everything we have going on here. Look at Jaskier’s jacket. What’s the first thing you notice? The bright yellow inset slashes in his chest. The high contrast in color draws the eye inwards and distracts from the breadth of his shoulders, where we have another cleverly cut poof. His jacket is again cropped, with strong vertical lines, over the baggiest pants he wears in the season.

Now look at Jaskier and Geralt together. Jaskier is all about long vertical lines, while Geralt’s predominate lines are either horizontal or diagonal. Additionally, Jaskier’s hips look even to his shoulders, even if they’re not, and Geralt’s shoulders are exaggerated. The two characters have a very different presence, even if the actors underneath are similar.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction to costume design! Creating the illusory effects like this is one of my favorite things and I am excited to share!!

I… I did not expect anyone to respond, let alone respond with a fucking screenshot-worthy answer. I love you. I literally love you. Can I marry you? Wait, can you be my tailor? Do you have an Etsy shop? I’m gonna be an archaeologist one day, I’ll need OUTFITS PLEASE I WANNA INDEFINITELY HIRE YOU

This is not my ship.  This is not my subject.  This is really not anything I ever anythinged about.  I just have to reblog this because of the utter BALLER response this person gave, which revolutionized my perception of costume design without me even knowing I wanted said perception revolutionized.  This comment is everything good about tumblr in one place, and @redhorsedawn, I salute you.  Magnificent.

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rushman2-0

Another costumer here!

@redhorsedawn you're so so right and I loved reading this! I wanna add something though about the construction of their armscyes!

You mentioned that Jaskier's armscyes might be cut artificially narrower, and I think you're right. Geralts are DEFINITELY artificially broader though.

It's the most obvious in that first photo:

The shoulder seams are easily a couple inches further down his arm (white) than where the ball of his shoulder ends (red). They took significant advantage of how round his deltoids and triceps are in order to pretend that's still shoulder. He's pretending arm is shoulder, while Jaskier:

Is pretending shoulder is arm, or even shoulder is costume. His shoulder accessories are definitely hiding real shoulder in their poof. Again, the white is the implied shoulder end, and the red is where it likely actually ends. We expect shoulders to be directly above armpits, so the diagonal cut of the cap sleeve makes the armpit appear much further in than it is. His cloths are also (likely) specifically tailored to create those creases at the shoulder line (circled in yellow) which provide an illusionary armscye much narrower than the real one.

Again in this picture, Jaskier's vest has thick, built in seams outlining where his "shoulder" is.

Geralt's armor has similar wrinkles to Jaskier's red doublet, except his are on the outside of his shoulder rather than the inside, making his torso line appear wider rather than narrower.

It's all about the lines, baby. *chefs kiss*

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wade wilson kidnaps hugh jackman in deadpool 3 bc he’s convinced he’s actually wolverine. he spends the whole movie lugging him around but he’s literally just hugh jackman

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creme-meme

hugh jackman does everything to prove that he’s hugh jackman. he sings, he tap dances, and he has an australian accent.

the reveal at the end of the movie is that hugh jackman isn’t wolverine, but wolverine is hugh jackman. logan went into witness protection in order to retire from being a superhero and having an alternate identity as an australian actor who started his career in musicals was basically fool proof until wade blew his cover story

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Aaaaaah, this is such important and good news.

As someone with complex health needs, it really is heartening to finally see so much progress being made with research and the results finally confirming what many of us suspected: that our complex ailments are the result of viral infection.

Still an absolute mother fucker for those affected, but still, progress!!

Please open and read the article, because the headline doesn’t do the results justice at all:

Becoming EBV-positive resulted in a 32-fold increased risk of later developing MS as opposed to remaining EBV-negative. The next-strongest known risk factor for MS is having a set of genes that encode for proteins found of the surface of certain immune cells. People with a particular set of these immune cells, who have a homozygous genotype for the HLA-DR15 allele, have a threefold increased risk of MS.

That is. Do you know how ludicrously strong a result that is. And they did some clever analysis to prove that it was EBV (mononucleosis/glandular fever) rather than any confounders:

Ascherio’s team examined antibodies against cytomegalovirus, another saliva-borne virus that has also infected most of the world’s population, to serve as a negative control. Individuals who were CMV-negative at their first sample showed no increased risk of MS if they later became CMV-positive.
MS is thought to have a long prodromal phase, meaning the disease could affect the immune system years before symptom onset and diagnosis. Could the EBV-MS relationship be reversed? Perhaps people who have MS but don’t yet show symptoms are more likely to develop an infection such as EBV. To rule this out, Ascherio’s team looked at 30 MS patients, and 30 healthy controls. They used a search tool called VirScan that enables the detection of any antibody raised against any protein in any of the ~200 viruses known to infect humans. The only virus to show significantly increased presence in MS cases was EBV.

Like, I have a degree in statistics, and I am comfortable with saying that this paper has shown that EBV causes MS. And in excellent concurrent news, Moderna has just started phase 1 trials of an mRNA vaccine against EBV! The future is now!

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alstroemeric

I was diagnosed with EBV last year and I’m terrified ha ha ha (I don’t have MS, they checked, …. yet)

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i’m watching an art theft documentary and they’re interviewing this art history professor from new york who was asked to go with the fbi to authenticate a rubens that had been stolen but it was a sting operation so they had to pretend like they weren’t the fbi, that they were some private buyer about to pay $3.5 million for it, and the fbi was like “this is a VERY delicate operation because you never know how they will react to what you have to say so let the agent do all of the talking, don’t say a word to anyone just nod if it’s the rubens, the last operation we did the guy in your position got shot because things went wrong in a second” and then it cuts to the professor’s interview and he says “i wasn’t going to fly down to miami to be a part of an undercover fbi sting operation to handle what could be rubens’s aurora and just NOT say anything. i was gonna have to ad lib a little” and then he tells the interviewer that when he & the fbi agent got to the hotel while he was examining the painting he started lecturing the other people, first on how badly they had wrapped it, and then about like how it had been painted, the history of it, what the subject was and what she was doing, etc etc, and he was like “i hadn’t taught a class on rubens in 15 years, so for me it was like being back in the classroom except my students couldn’t leave” 

at one point during the deal the professor turned to the woman selling it and he said “isn’t this just the most beautiful rubens you’ve ever seen outside of a museum?” (because the fbi had told him earlier that this piece had been stolen from a museum) and THEN he said “where on earth did you get it from?” and the group of people the woman had with her was like taxidermy-fox.png but the woman was like “inheritance” can you IMAGINE the fbi agent about to have a fucking aneurysm when this random guy you’ve brought in just to nod if it’s the right painting not only starts giving an impromptu lecture but then he asks how they got it

omg BLESS YOU for the link and the time stamp that was as glorious as described by the OP

Y’all failed to mention that HE posted the video HIMSELF and liked every single comment oh my god

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One of the things that sucks about being an animation nerd is having to live with the fact that, from a technical standpoint, the Hotel Transylvania movies are absolutely ground-breakingly staggeringly incredible.

As completely ignorant on animation, why is that? How is Hotel Transylvania any good??

The short version is that they’ve been figuring out how to plug the strengths of traditional animation into cg animation.

Longer version: cg animation is essentially puppet animation. You build a model, paint it and dress it up, and then move it around. That’s why Pixar’s first animated film was about toys, and their second one was about bugs: it’s much harder to make something look convincingly soft and fleshy than it is to work with something that’s supposed to be rigid.

Working inside this paradigm, the progression that makes sense is to work on developing more and more articulated puppets. Figure out how to add fur (Monsters, Inc.), move fish (Finding Nemo), get to the point where you can actually make human puppets who look appealing (The Incredibles.) In 2012 the big animated feature films showed off huge strides in particle physics (The Guardians), and hair (Tangled, Brave). Character effects and lighting were really hitting their stride, and the general movement was towards more detailed models, increased realism, richer and more intricate environments. The models only had so much range before they started to break, so squash & stretch was never going to be as pronounced as something from drawn animation could be. Hotel Transylvania challenged that.

As a show creator and director, Genndy Tartakovsky’s always shown a preference for stylization. He’s also got a reputation for incredible and deliberate timing, spectacular silhouettes, dramatic movement and clear staging, and just overall really good at directing animation. He wanted Tex Avery-type animation in CG and by golly, he did it.

Look at how exaggerated those shapes are, and how snappy, smooth, and fast the transitions between each one: that’s not something that was really being done. The motion-blurring alone was so defining that apparently Sony calls it a “Genndy blur.”

Animation is essentially the art of movement: the better the movement, the better the animation, and the Hotel Transylvania franchise has spectacular movement.

The model is actually being resculpted for maximum exaggeration, and the smears and blurs make the transitions between each pose fast, energetic, and snappy.

Like. Look at that movement. Look at how tightly he’s rooted while the follow through of his clothing sells the hard stop of each hip bump. Look at how sharp and deep his knees are bending, the way his weight shifts onto his heels and that tiny little side step at the very end, where he keeps his weight on his right foot for a split second before popping over to his new position. And he’s dancing the Macarena because he had to find the most brain-dominating, toe-tappingist song in the universe to win a DJ battle where a Kraken was being driven into a murderous rage by a mystical melody and it had to be counteracted by another song.

Yeah.

Somebody once described the Hotel Transylvania franchise as “like seeing Lamborghini making a clown car,” and honestly, that’s kind of what it’s like.

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You would need to convince someone from the year 2000 pretty hard that the terms: Proud Boys and Let’s Go Brandon are not gay groups or slang

Only kinda related, but I was just thinking recently that in 2000 the phrase “We don’t want Harry Potter books in this house,” meant you were a conservative Christian screaming about devil worship, and now it means you support trans and Jewish people.

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