alright i am sick of yt to mp4 sites being shady and full of viruses and finding websites that seem to be working and then don't work (looking at you y232 (no hate, just frustrated))

so HERE'S HOW YOU DOWNLOAD YOUTUBE VIDEOS WITH VLC!! VLC FREAKIN RULES!!

the quality might be a little crummy but if you don't mind that, then shabam! video on your computer! then you can email it to yourself and have it on your phone too if you want! if you need a guide with pictures wikihow has you covered my friends

happy downloading and stay safe on the internet :D

I FORGOT SOMETHING SHOOT I'M REALLY SORRY

YOU NEED TO UPDATE YOUR YOUTUBE.LUAC FILE FOR THIS TO WORK!!!

PLEASE REBLOG THIS ADDITION FOR THE LOVE OF CRUMBCAKE THIS IS RIDICULOUSLY IMPORTANT

(and re: other additions in the tags, I hear you and that’s totally fair you want quality! but if you really don’t care and/or those websites are blocked, this is a workaround you can use)

As a side note this is all perfectly legal. When sued by google, the French courts (because VLCs parent organization is French) concluded that because Youtube was distributing their videos for free, people had every right to download them for free, and no violation of intellectual property was being committed.

hi

don't you hate it when that happens

ps @bittersweetresilience this is dedicated to you for all your amazing tags

I was wondering for an while.

Best web browser for artists and creatives?

So quick up found these

An article but has good information

Here

And

This opera version never saw before in till now.

Here

btw guys, you can do spoiler text on AO3! here's the html:

<details><summary>the text you want people to see</summary>The text you want to spoiler or hide</details>

it turns it into a little toggleable drop down that shows things and then hides them. it's great for content warnings in ao3 notes if you're worried about spoiling your fic--people who feel like they can proceed without any specific warnings can do so but people who want to see a warning or spoiler can choose to.

i tried it on firewatch au chapter three, it works:

if that html doesn't work, then here's the reddit comment i got it from by an r/ao3 moderator and former ao3 staff memeber. I copied it from here and it worked perfectly, but it didn't paste into tumblr so I manually typed it.

Worm comics worm comics!!!! Comics about miraculous ladybug but they’re worm themed

(What you have to know at this point is that @carpisuns drew them as worms and it was very cute and funny and you should go beg her to post them)

The party hats and the wormfel tower are from some things @anna-scribbles drew and if you want to see those drawings the only thing to do is go beg her. Sorry that’s the rules

WORM COMICS

14 Books Perfect for Your Valentine's Read

1. The Spanish Love Deception by Elena Armas

- slow burn

- perfect for fans of The Hating Game and Mariana Zapata

- fake dating

- enemies to lovers

- grumpyxsunshine

- guy fell first

2. The Hating Game by Sally Thorne

- hate-to-love relationship

- the sick scene is *double thumbs up

- grumpyxsunshine

- shared one office

3. The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

- grumpyxsunshine

- fake dating

- Age gap

- women in science

- the friendships you wish you have

4. People We Meet On Vacation

- friends to lovers

- Harry Meets Sally x Love Rosie Vibe

- have one of the best heroine speech

- a feel good - tearjerker story (at least for me)

5. The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

- the autism rep is good

- cool inclusion of Vietnamese culture

- fake dating

- perfect blend of sweet and steamy

- trigger warnings: anxiety attacks, abandonment, a fatphobic comment or insult, and someone telling someone else about a person's diagnosis

6. The Bride Test by Helen Hoang

- cute smutty romance

- with high functioning autistic and geeky hero who's struggles and passion for his few interest is genuine

- with uneducated Vietnamese immigrant heroine who's hard not to love

- shatters ignorant stereotypes as you witness internal battle, growth and love

7. The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang

- two individuals from different worlds that cross paths towards the way of healing and learning more about each other for the betterment of their individual selves

- beautiful emotional book

- elicited an emotional reaction a few times which meant something right?

8. . Kulti by Mariana Zapata

- age gap

- slow burn

- grumpy hero

- awesome heroine

9. The Wall of Winnipeg and Me by Mariana Zapata

- slow burn

- fake dating (more like a fake marriage but it's legal)

- have interesting side characters

- fun banter and bickering

10. From Lukov With Love by Mariana Zapata

- hero and heroine seemed to hate each other on the surface

- slow burn

- the main characters are figure skaters

- great character development

11. All Rhodes Lead Here by Mariana Zapata

- slow burn

- age gap

- grumpy landlord x sunshine tenant

- great storytelling

- fun and heartwarming

12. Wild at Heart by K.A. Tucker

- book 2 of The Simple Wild

- bearded bush pilot

- tackles couples journey in overcoming their domestic problems

- with great and interesting side characters

13. It Happened One Summer by Tessa Bailey

- bearded fisherman from Washington x fashionable influencer from L.A.

- the romance was to die for

- did not expect to be steamy because of that cute cover

14. Beach Read by Emily Henry

- top tier romance read

- with beautiful narrative and story

- great world building and character development

- have fun, deep and smart conversations

Miraculous Ladybug + Banned Tags

(@bannedtags)

Yoooo he just changed the game

Oh, this is really neat, this is the same thing they did in Sh! The Octopus in 1937 to do this transformation scene. In black & white, the color of your light can hide makeup, then all you have to do is flip the color, and the audience just sees the difference in the light levels, but cannot see the color shift. The quick explanation for why this works is the blue makeup absorbs red light, looking very dark when only red light is present, but also looks about the same as relatively fair skin when only blue light is present. Same goes for the colors the other way.

Ahh, I think that they had this in one of the early Jekyll and Hyde adaptations as well. :)

Twilight Zone used this trick too, in The Howling Man, where this guy morphs into the Devil.

And again in Long Live Walter Jameson, where this guy loses his artificial youth

I think the first time it was used was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1931.

God, I love practical effects

http://sevencamels.blogspot.ca/2008_12_01_archive.html

Hirotaka & Narumi

Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival 

please elaborate

Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.

So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.

You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses. 

So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding. 

Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else. 

The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf. 

And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it. 

And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.

one quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinely wrong. 

but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.

there’s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today. 

This is the second branch of this post I’ve reblogged and like the fourth I’ve seen and I’m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because…with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn’t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is…part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.

You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.

There’s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn’t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don’t…know how to expand on that point.

TIME TO DE-EVILIZE

just some thoughts about existing online as a creator