Anyway, fuck Adobe, and enjoy!
Give credit to the 30-year-old who worked on this for free and offers this service for free!
WHAT?!
I study graphic design and my tutor recommended and used this in his classes at art college last year, it’s so good it has SO many features for free, I really recommend it, even if you’re just trying to learn the basics of PS, such a wonderful thing <3
nancy drew and the case of the color work sweater🔍
⏯️ Watch Now:
I love when Arthur completely disregards information. Like the episode in season three when he's getting the fisher kings trident or whatever. And he gets told "you can't do this alone, you'll need Strength and 𝕸𝖆𝖌𝖎𝖈" and he's just like, "cool, anyways". Then his best bud Merlin and this fucking guy he's chummy with show up and he also just like, "cool, anyways" albeit a little more whiny abt his quest getting "messed up".
I'm so amazed by his ability to Worry About That Later.™️.
He also just. Doesn't seem to notice a difference in his physical health in this episode. Not even a "man why am I so tired". He's fit. He's used to journies like this. Merlin and Gwaine got through the same portion he did and weren't even phased, but apparently it was completely logical for him to be having to have a quick nap (read: damsel faint) every couple of hours. Or whatever the fuck the time span of that was.
Love when my Boy Thang servant shows up and the grip of death I hadn't noticed until now is suddenly gone.
You boggle me, blonde boy
Started watching Merlin
if you've never engaged with a creative art on a regular basis you need to understand that it requires concerted effort to get into "the groove" to make something and every second that it takes to get into that groove causes physical pain, but the only thing worse than doing it is not doing it.
plagues history and global epidemiology as an autistic special interest was already a heavy topic but not a day goes by I dont briefly recall drunkenly telling people at the bar in autumn 2019 “yeah the next pandemic will probably be a coronavirus and we’re due for one”
if they remember that i have to wonder if they think they met the devil at the club that night
for those confused about the boop-o-meter, when you opt in it will give you a little button next to your username that other people will be able to click and send you a notification that says boop! a little cat paw will appear on your screen for a second when you do it to other people
if you opt out for the day, the button wont be there. and if you hover over it for a few seconds, it'll do a little spin and then you can do a super boop!
Alright, so: I want to explain a little more about this connection between the Twilight fandom, Fifty Shades of Grey, and seemingly, the self-publishing industry as a whole. It's a lot, so I'm going to have to chip away at it a bit at a time, and I think the best place to start is by describing the scene in late 2000s Twilight fandom.
In 2009, Twilight was one of the biggest fandoms in the world, although it was nearly invisible to outsiders because it
That meant for many Twilight fans, Twilight was fandom. It was all they knew, and many had no path out. That also made it a corked champagne bottle with the pressure building.
Because of these community dynamics and the declining quality of the Twilight books themselves, Twilight fanfiction evolved to be mostly AUs so alternate they were more-or-less original romance novels that used Bella and Edward as broad character templates. (x)
Seriously, Twilight fandom got really crazy big for a few years there. It was not totally uncommon to get multi-million clicks on a semi-popular story. It's weird looking back on it and calling it "Twilight fandom" because it was really more like "Romance Novel fandom". For real, for a period there, calling a Twilight fanfic author a 'Twilight fan' would be the ultimate insult. But they never stopped writing about Edward and Bella! It's so weird. (x)
If you were in 2000s era fandom, you're probably aware of the phenomenon of Big Name Fans and the various social-climbing dynamics that happened around them. The Twilight fandom took this social power game another level:
This wasn't even just an author thing. There were Big Name Authors (BNAs) but there were also Big Name Readers. These were basically like... full-time rabid fans of a BNA. They devoted so much of their time to helping out the BNAs, reviewing their chapters, making them fanart, promoting their fics, kissing their asses with cringe-worthy intensity, you name it. Which is why you saw what looked like BNAs having 'employees', such as Moi, tby789's Director of Marketing. (x)
It became apparent that these power games weren't just for fandom clout. The fandom was proving that that social power could be translated into real-world dollars. You see, the Twilight fandom used to organize charity auctions where big name authors would auction off custom fanfiction, and the money generated was substantial:
Mostly authors would auction off stories. So if you donated in my name, I'd write you 10,000 words of porn in my Tattward universe, or something new, etc. That's how it worked. The 2009 auction raised $80,000. The 2010 auction raised $140,000. The 2011 auction raised $20,00. [NOTE: this is likely a typo] (x)
A lot of these dynamics were not unique to the Twilight fandom, but it was the combination that created a perfect storm of opportunism. This would end up changing not just fandom dynamics but the publishing industry as a whole.
I'm going to have to back up a moment and talk about the self-publishing industry, because while I think a lot of people on here are familiar with the concept of self-publishing, this part of the internet doesn't have much contact with the industry of self-publishing. The part where the big money is.
Mostly, that happens on Amazon, and involves books that look like this:
(this is just a selection from the current top 100 in LGBT romance on Amazon. I'm not familiar with any of these books in particular and the following may not describe them specifically, this is just to capture the general look of the thing.)
It will be impossible for me to cover all the dynamics at play in Amazon self-publishing, suffice it to say that there is a lot of money to be made hitting the top of the Kindle store. That wolf book up there is currently at #971 on Amazon, meaning it's selling around 114 copies a day, which at its $4.99 pricepoint is $568 a day, which is $17065 a month. The author certainly has other popular titles as well. This is oversimplifying, but you get the idea. There’s potentially a lot of money to be made.
The broad rules of the game are to release books as often as you possibly can (some authors release entire novels monthly) and to write books that copy established trends and dynamics as closely as possible (remember this, it will come up later.)
That means trends will rise and fall quickly on the charts, since a lot of the biggest players release books on a rotating 30-90 day basis. An mpreg book starts selling like crazy? You're guaranteed to see dozens of others within the month. It's a grueling race to keep up with, and as you can imagine AI has thrown a wrench in the works (but that's outside the scope of this post.)
In 2010, the heyday of the Twilight fandom, none of this had happened yet. Ebooks had just barely begun to become a cultural force. Smartphones (which were new at the time) meant that suddenly everyone was carrying around an e-reader with them 24/7, meaning ebooks were suddenly much easier for people to pick up on the fly. And unlike with a physical book, when you're reading an ebook, nobody can see what it is.
Enter Fifty Shades of Grey.
It's pretty well known by now that Fifty Shades of Grey began its life as a Twilight fanfiction called Master of the Universe, a BDSM / No-Vampires AU by Snowqueens Icedragon published between 2009 and 2011 (although its eventual publisher would go on to claim that Fifty Shades was an entirely original novel inspired by MOTU, it's at this point a matter of public record that they are the same work with only superficial alterations.)
why didn’t gandalf just carry the ring to mordor himself with these tongs
like i’m picturing him being really careful and looking at it and carrying it exactly like this while walking or riding through the woods and across rivers and up mountains and through valleys and he doesn’t drop it even once except at the very end where he tidily drops it into the volcano. frodo sam and the crew and even gollum wholly undisturbed. sauron can’t find him bc of the meditative aura surrounding him which is generated by his immense focus on not dropping it
World's most tense egg and spoon race
this somehow became the funniest thing on earth in my head and I had to draw it so
As long as the locks hold they can't get out.
One thing i find really interesting is that at one point it was said that Zoan type divil fruits influence their users, wich would put more reason behind why luffy seems to liberate entire countrys for something as simple as a single bowl of rice. His devil fruit literally makes him a god, and a common offering for gods is food, so when people give him food and tell him about their problems he automatically wants to help them since they technically made an offering
FINALLY some good fucking feature ideas from the tumblr devs. tamagotchi renaissance now
I feel like “I expect it” is a completely different vibe from the rest of this scale??
Child emperor ass response
“Katharine Hepburn liked to shock with her boyish looks, strident voice, breeding, and, when she met people for the first time, her affection for purposely creating a bad impression. Rigid and repressed, the twenty-four year old, freckled-faced Conneticutt Yankee always lived with women, mingled with sewing-circle members, and made Garbo and Katharine Cornell her icons. She was swimming naked in director George Cukor’s pool when she first met Garbo and, in printed versions of the encounter, grabbed a towel, curtsied, and solemnly said, ‘Oh, Miss Garbo, how nice to meet you!’ Hepburn was seen about town with her agent the dashing, successful Leland Hayward, but Hayward’s third wife, Margaret Sullavan, called Kate ‘that dykey bitch.’”
-From The Sewing Circle: Female Stars Who Loved Other Women
What on earth is going on in the Star Trek fandom today, it's like my dash exploded
lol 28 years ago today, the Star Trek Voyager episode "Threshold" aired. The premise of the episode was that humans cannot travel at or faster than warp 10, because if they do, they would be traveling at "infinite velocity" and would exist in all points of space time simultaneously. Tom Paris found a way to travel at this speed, and doing so accidentally hyper-evolved him and his captain (Janeway) into giant salamanders, whereupon they immediately reproduced and created 3 baby salamanders. They were then turned back into normal humans, and forced to leave their salamander babies on the planet they had escaped to.
The episode was long held as the worst star trek episode. Not just the worst Star Trek Voyager episode, but the worst episode, period, because it was extremely weird and people turning into salamanders greatly annoyed a lot of people who don't know what fun is. Tumblr, having discovered this episode like excavating an exciting fossil, has taken a shine to this episode and many people now produce art and memes and eat pepperoni pizza in celebration of its air date, mostly to annoy the episode's creator, as in a very Arthur Conan Doyle way, he hates this episode and wants it de-canonized.
Anyway, happy Threshold Day!
