Bothering the beast

1. Ah Fai was a chief animator for McDull’s animated features. He’s super cool. Ultimate senpai. 

2. Previous post on breakdowns right here 

Some thoughts on acceleration and force

I presented this in the order of how I slowly understood the trick of delivering force - first an abstract concept of impact taught by Ah Fai, then a more complicated discovery on the acceleration pattern, last back to a more abstract concept of breakdowns. 

Like I’ve previously stressed, 2D animation is everything but one single approach. There’s no one rule that rules them all, but interchangeable ideas with math, or physics, or music, etc. There’s no “perfect” animation either, but what is perceived as organic and dynamic. E.g., using the Fibonacci numbers to animate didn’t bring me a perfect animation! On the other hand, a tiny change in the pattern could already make the feeling of force so much more powerful. 

Not so much of a tutorial than a personal experience. I hope you find this interesting hahaha 

okay hey wait art suggestion time. stop locking yourself in to an art style. especially if you're anyone whos still in/under highschool. but even then stop fucking doing that.

theres nothing wrong with having a preferred style to draw in (clearly as a guy writing a multi book comic i know. trust that i know) but if you catch yourself thinking 'i cant draw that its not my style' or 'i want to learn to draw like that but its not my style' you gotta knock that shit off

you are not a brand. you are not a company. you are a person learning a skill and how the hell do you know what 'your style' is without trying to learn to draw in different ones? please do style studies. please try drawing realism even if it looks like shit at first. try doing abstract works. you dont have to like them but im begging you at least to try, because the things you learn carry over into your main body of work. and youll see yourself grow in ways you didnt think you could 'in your style'.

it rules to be a transgender writer because writing trans themes is easy as fuck. it's easy as fuck dude. trans themes basically write themselves. change is the fundamental motor of storytelling. guess what else is all about change bitch

People... watch out for these things!

The saying applies with more than usual force here: if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer: you're the product being sold. (And maybe you're the product being sold even if you are paying for it.)

DO NOT MAKE YOUR PERSONAL PHYSICAL DATA AVAILABLE TO PEOPLE WHO COULD THEN SELL IT TO THOSE INVESTED IN USING IT TO SURVEIL YOU AND POTENTIALLY CHARGE YOU WITH CRIMES.

anyway the actual point of fandom is to inspire each other. reading each other's fics and admiring each other's art and saying wow i love this and i feel something and i want to invoke this in other people, i want to write a sentence that feels like a meteor shower, i want to paint a kiss with such tenderness it makes you ache, i want to create something that someone else somewhere will see it and think oh, i need to do that too, right now. i am embracing being a corny cunt on main to say inspiring each other is one of the things humanity is best at and one of the things fandom is built for and i think that's beautiful

Audre Lorde, from "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" (1981)

Gather around, chickens

i am using the power bestowed upon me by being a fanartist for…. good? evil?

[ID: a colored doodle of the hargreeves siblings as chickens, trailing behind Reginald. Chicken-Klaus is flying. Chicken-Viktor is particularly small, and chicken-Five is a chick. End ID.]

behold: what has been taking up my time for the past two and a half weeks!

this piano was a public art commissions for the city! it's covered in dinosaurs that have actually been found (and in the case of 3 of them, discovered) in my home state of colorado. i'm super happy with how it turned out and i had a blast painting it :^)

[image id: a piano painted with various dinosaurs. the left half of the piano represents the dinosaurs in their fossilized form as bones surrounded by fossil leaves and debris. the right half of the piano is the dinosaurs alive in their natural environments. among the species featured are fish, ammonites, orthocones, a plesiosaur, pterosaurs, a brontosaurus, a triceratops, a stegosaurus, and a fruitadens]

it's so fucking frustrating to be in college and know everyone uses chatgpt and to be tempted by it constantly while also knowing intellectually that it doesn't work and it's a bad idea. like, i hang out in the library a lot, and i see people using chatgpt on assignments almost every day. and i know it isn't a good way to learn, because it's not really "artificial intelligence" so much as it is an auto text generator. and it gives you wrong information or badly worded sentences all the time. but every week i stare down assignments i don't want to do and i think man. if only i could type this prompt into a text generator and have it done in 10 minutes flat. and i know it wouldn't work. it wouldn't synthesize information from the text the way professors want, it wouldn't know how to answer questions, it just spits out vaguely related words for a couple paragraphs. but knowing my classmates get their work done in 10 minutes flat with it while i fight every ounce of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in my body is infuriating.

i think one thing that's been really helpful in keeping myself from using it is thinking about Why i have to do the specific assignments i have. like what is the actual goal. like some assignments the goal isn't "share a story about parenting styles in ur personal life" so much as it is "show you understand the concept of parenting styles thru a story". or it's not "how do hormones impact teenagers' decision making abilities" it's "can you understand, reword, synthesize, and explain the information in the text and videos to explain how hormones impact teenagers' decision making abilities". and looking at it as "this assignment is asking me to read some words and then understand and explain them, which is a skill i want to have" rather than "i have to answer these stupid questions that seem really obvious because all my professors want me to die forever" has helped. especially in a world where everyone uses chatgpt i want to know how to read with my own brain

Vintage Photos of Queer Couples of Color

as someone who can have two cups of black tea several hours apart (never even one caffeinated coffee!) and then if i dare to venture any further i’m a jittery dizzy wreck who can’t sleep, i am so curious about how other people’s bodies handle this substance!

Idk about this one boys, Cookie Monster always refers to Cookie Monster's self as "Cookie Monster".

no he doesn’t. he refers to himself as “me.” elmo’s the one that talks in third person. that’s the joke. elmo doesn’t use pronouns and cookie monster is blue. how dare you assume i made this post and didnt know my fucking sesame street history. christ

Why does @firefox-official know the ancient sesame Street lore?

Remember these terms for professions to help encourage gender neutral language!

At the inspiration of the Murderbot Discord community, especially @blessphemy, I made a little Murderbot Diaries zine!

PresAux’s Favorite Foods, as described by themselves. A combination of headcanons about the characters and Preservation food culture, and inspiring myself to draw fun little things with my range of nice markers again.