nano progress catchall

bc i don't want a million posts about it. i will have a million reblogs instead.

a good start!! ... and of course half of it is for a scene that will never see the light of day any time soon.

for a moment there i thought i was in trouble. i thought i'd lost 4k words in scrivener somewhere and spent almost 20 minutes looking for lost files and shit... i still don't know why the bottom word count doesn't match the actual word count. almost lost all motivation to finish nano.... scrivener why would you do this to me

anyway i'm always at 20k for nano!! have not gamed as much as i thought i would. mostly writing the past week. not sure how it'll go next week.

"Alright, time to see what this animated poetry movie is like-

Oh jesus christ"

To elaborate outside of initial tags:

So this is from 30,000 Miles From Chang’an, which is a 2 hours 47 minutes(!!?) long Chinese animated film that is basically an actually legitimate historical epic and historical biopic (think Gladiator & Amadeus) made into animation, and also passionate tribute to classical art and culture, similar to something like Miss Hokusai or Millennium Actress.

I heard it was decent before, but was not expecting it to be This Ambitious. The Criminally Underrated Champ of 2023 Animation

so i really like this show and decided that i should make a powerpoint to get people to watch it. and now 5 hours later here we are. this is my pitch. please watch 莲花楼

yknow AI art has ruined an entire genre of painting to me, i saw one of those smooth anime-realism pieces and immidiately thought ''ugh, AI art'' until i noticed it was posted by an established deviantart user 6 years ago. like ive never been a huge fan of that genre but it looks like a pretty difficult style to master and i feel bad for the artists who specialized in anime-realism only to have their entire market jacked by people typing keywords into midjourney.

I have something to add to this. every single time I look up reference pictures, I get shitty ai generated bullshit. I've actually reached the point where I discovered that pasting this into google gives you a solid filter for 99% of the ai art. typing in -"word" will filter out all results with that word. I might end up making another one to filter out costumes and all that shit for better historical results when looking at outfits for my characters from various time periods.

if you don't put a space before it, it won't work so keep that in mind. if there are any I might have missed that are still coming up in your results, put them in tags. and I'll add them to the original post. if you see this and you end up using it, please reblog so more people, especially artists and charecter designers, are able to find it. Google is becoming rapidly unstable due to the influx of ai art, and it makes me incredibly sad, first of all, that my work as an artist is becoming rabidly obsolete. This is not worth it. Ai art is not worth it.

Here is the anti ai filter, note that this only works for image searches and only serves as a filter for art. due to the amount of ai writing concealed in media, I have no real way to create a filter for that. I hope this helps the art homies who are sick of this shit, and the people who just want to look at human art for a change:

-”starryAI” -”Krea” -”freepik” -”lexica” -”Midjourney” -”hayo” -”storybird.ai” -"Craiyon" -"ai art generator" -"prompt hunt" -"Opendream's ai" -"nightcafe creator" -"arthub.ai" -"open art" -"playground ai" -"PixAi.art" -"Creative fabrica" -”ai” -”Tensor.art” -”Images.Ai”

As a 19-year-old sophomore at Stanford, Elizabeth Holmes decided to transform diagnostic medicine so she dropped out of college and used her tuition money to start her own company, Theranos. Ten years later, Holmes, pictured here holding a micro-vial, is on the cutting edge of medical technology — her new blood testing method allows hundreds of tests to be run using only a few drops of blood. And, Holmes’ methods are cheaper, faster, more accurate, and less invasive than conventional methods which often require a separate vial of blood for every test. As Holmes told Wired.com earlier this year, “I started this company because I wanted to spend my life changing our health care system. When someone you love gets really sick, most of the time when you find out, it’s too late to be able to do something about it. It’s heartbreaking… We wanted to make actionable health information accessible to people everywhere at the time it matters most. That means two things: being able to detect conditions in time to do something about them and providing access to information that can empower people to improve their lives.”

read more from A Mighty Girl

Reasons you should adore Elizabeth Holmes:

click that link in the second reblog it’s like a rickroll but better. true environmental storytelling

We don’t talk enough about how fanfiction writers love to give character large amounts of non-specific paperwork they hate doing

say more pls

Yeah sure why not.

So most stories take place when Events are Happening, and this means that no matter what kind of job the characters have, they’re probably not too focused on them. Fanfics, on the other hand, often show the down time. Which means that the writer has to figure out what the hell these characters do in their jobs. Unless the characters have a job the author understands or knows well, the author is often at a loss for what to have the character doing.

So they sit them at a desk and give them paperwork. What is the paperwork for? Rarely specified. It is Paper Work for the characters Important Adult Job they have and they need to read or sign it or something. And there’s always a line about how Character Hates Paperwork. Doesn’t matter if Character is a Mafia Boss or a General or a Diplomat, here they are in an office trying to get out of Doing Paperwork.

There’s also a sense of, like, humor and mundanity that comes with it. Like the examples above, it always particularly stands out to me when a dangerous individual is griping about some paper they need to sign or something. The less you can picture Character doing paperwork, all the better to force it upon them. If Character is saddled with Paperwork, they’re usually now concerned about the physical damages their motley crew causes, because damage = More Paperwork.

Anyway I just think it’s fun or funny, Sephiroth doing paper work and Sawada Tsunayoshi doing paper work and this just in, Tony Stark is doing paperwork. Sorry, Phoenix Wright can’t play right now. Yeah, it’s paperwork.

this doesnt seem like a popular opinion on here but sometimes i like when characters die. sometimes its needed to raise the stakes and sometimes its the end best befitting of the character and sometimes its needed to move the narrative forward and sometimes its the only way a character would believably leave their story behind and sometimes it just spices things up a bit. sometimes its fun to watch characters die . sorry

Hey what do you mean the Israeli government is actually harvesting sperm from the corpses of IDF soldiers.

If I were a state run media outlet, you would have to waterboard this out of me. They just fucking tweeted it. Publicly. On Twitter.

This was my art school’s water fountain. Drink from them wolf tiddies

Assignment misunderstood. I have now built a city.

Give it a day

Reblog if you remember this motherfucker:

ooh i have a nice fun fact!

Static was WILDLY popular in Brazil (a country where the population is over 50% black) and we had re-runs for YEARS on open television. Everyone who was a kid in the 2000s knew and loved him. As a result, every single Brazilian Con has a LOT of static cosplayers!

So, a couple of years ago, Comic Con Experience (the biggest con in Brazil, which is actually also the biggest con in the world!) invited Static’s creator Denys Cowan as one of the guests of honor.

Now. Thousands of people attend his panel. And cosplayers went NUTS because they could show their Static cosplay to the creator himself! What none of us expected was Debts Cowan’s reaction:

He cried on stage.

He had never seen Static cosplayers - especially not so many of them! And he had no idea the show was popular here! No one ever told him his character was so beloved! Years and years of reruns and he had no idea! He obviously created the character with his experiences and his community (Black North Americans) in mind. Still, he accidentally touched a whole other community of black people who could see themselves on the screen as a superhero!

Anyway he is a lovely person and one of the best, most memorable guests we had. And I think this is a nice reminder that your art might touch people you can’t even imagine would when creating it.

hope is a skill

hope is a weapon you are trained to wield

favourite additions

You cannot hide this in the tags, bestie. This is too lovely to keep a secret.

I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.

RATING: RELIABLE

you can listen to the clip of the 1954 interview here and find him on wikipedia here

Mosab Abu Toha, from Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

i think that killing a dragon should have catastrophic nuclear-fallout level environmental consequences tbh. their blood should scorch and wither the earth with fire and poison, the toxic fumes released as they decay should choke the land and all nearby living creatures, and the entire landscape where they fell should be transformed into a blighted wasteland where bleached leviathan bones loom upwards out of the ground as a warning that can be seen from miles away, the boundary markers of an exclusion zone.

i also think that it would be wonderfully ironic if those who sought the fame and glory of the title of 'dragonslayer' only ended up with the bitter, enduring reminder of the devastation they're responsible for. this is not a place of honor. no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.

i love how theres no rules for pronouncing words in English, you literally just have to learn and hear someone say every single word

if anyone is wondering why this is, it's because they stopped teaching American children (and many British) the rules (which exist, and have been standardized and written down for centuries) sometime at the turn of the 21st century. if you are gen x or older, have English degree-holding parents, and/or had any really old teachers who were still teaching into the "fuck grammar" era of public schooling, you unlock a special level of English comprehension where you can pronounce 99% of words perfectly without ever hearing them at all, as well as the ability to code switch to a higher-"class" dialect of English at will, which is extremely important for any social interaction where you have to deal with people who are judging you for such a thing, which happens a lot more often than you're aware of unless someone has already told you about it. usually no one tells you about it unless they're teaching it.

there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a "de-snobbification" of english education where everyone's regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don't think it's their job to fix your high school teacher's fuckups. (it is, but that's a different post)

this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn't before

this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about "vibes based literacy".

anyway the lesson here is every time the education establishment announces they are about to make education "less formal" and that this will benefit "everyone", because hooray we all thought learning cursive and sentence diagramming and Greek word roots was boring, right? what they are actually announcing is that you will still be judged for not being able to use those formal skills, but now only rich people will be able to learn them from tutors as basic education becomes increasingly privatized.

specifically on the topic of pronouncing words, a conlang nerd sat down and brute-force compiled a numbered list of rules for correctly pronouncing english words that gets it right for nearly every word 23 years ago (the date explains why his phonetic transcription is so weird, sorry)