The Boy in the Wind

I was high off my ass last night and had this dream where I was in this dense ass forest and sitting there was a tall woman. She was so tall I couldn’t see her face but she was wearing gold and I was like “uh…hi?” And she said “I made you, do you know that?” And I nodded and she was like “I hear your thoughts. Why do you hate my creation? Why do you try to destroy yourself? I made you perfect as you are. Please don’t break my heart”. Then she started crying and it flooded and I woke up with fucking heart palpitations like what does it Mean™️????

polar opposite of this post

inspiration struck and would not let me go until i drew this

edit: you can now get this comic as a print!

The timing for the TikTok jingle at the end did it for me

junimo breakdancing

animated on stream !!

->

@reginboi @demilypyro

Turtle lock its a turtle lock y'all!

This is a magic item of some kind

“The aspens have eyes and the trees bark.”

Decided to animate this piece

Here’s a video so you can hear the water and the thrushes. I took it for you because you couldn’t be there. <3

In case anyone could use this right now.

Excuse me while I sneeze 30 times in a row…

IS THAT POLLEN???????????????????????????????????????

magic spell

I cast “allergies bad enough to delete you from existence”

everyone in the notes either has allergies or is a whore

@yeahitsak

I’m sorry I’m staring at your bulge so disrespectfully, I kinda want it in my mouth

This is why she’s my favorite author.

Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).

More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.

As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”

A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.

So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.

*****

We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm, a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.

Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.

We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.

You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane​ says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…

For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.

Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:

This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.

And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.

There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.

Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.

And here’s the effect it produces.

Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.

Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.

This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.

But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.

 It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.

Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.

They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.

Here’s Jason Kingsley making one.

@lurkinglurkerwholurks look it’s Cherryh of the Cuckoo’s Egg!

Also, just wanted to add one fun bit of detail regarding Barry Lyndon. So, until very very recently, it was extremely difficult to shoot scenes in low lighting conditions, especially on celluloid, which is why the lighting is “inaccurately” bright for most period pieces and why older films leaned so hard on the “blue for night” technique (where you shoot during the day or early evening well light scenes and then color-time them to be a darker blue).

But Stanley Kubrick being the incorrigible perfectionist that he was, didn’t want to do that for Barry Lyndon and he really wanted lean into the beauty of candle lighting. So, what did they do? THEY ENGINEERED A NEW FILM CAMERA THAT COULD SHOOT IN LOW LIGHTING CONDITIONS. You should really watch the film, it’s absolutely gorgeous and if you ever get to see it on the big screen don’t miss it.

As for movies and shows like Game of Thrones that end up with scenes that are too dark, there’s a number of things going on. First, I do have to play devil’s advocate a bit in that I think there are parts of the Battle for Winterfell where it makes sense to go as dark as they did, specifically the beginning which plays heavily on the anticipatory fear of monsters approaching in a nigh impenetrable darkness. And I thought the aerial sequence where you see the Dothraki get obliterated merely from the visual of their torches winking out was a nice touch. However, when the battle proper actually starts it is indeed too dark and some of the action is a bit hard to follow. Now, the cinematographer is not entirely wrong about people not calibrating their TVs correctly. Most people don’t play with those settings enough but even so, most modern TVs do not give you the level of control that you get with the kind of monitors colorists are working with.

But that brings us to the next piece, cinematographers working at that level, are usually not spending that much time on color correction (also known as color timing) beyond throwing on a LUT (Look-UP Tables, which take the washed out base look of digital footage and adds a kind of blanket color correction, and each model of camera has their own set of LUTs). This is because color correction is a whole ass job unto itself in the industry. There are people, Colorists and Online Editors (people who take the final cut of the film/episode after it’s been uprezzed and they make it look as nice as possible), who build their whole careers around the process of adjusting the color profile of footage. And it truly is kind of an arcane science I only partially understand.

So, the cinematographer is kind of talking out his ass a bit when he says people aren’t properly calibrating their TV monitors. Now that we do have cameras that can shoot in incredibly low lighting conditions, you have directors/producers who want to lean into that. And the problem is, you can shoot in low light conditions and accurately capture the action with all of the details there, but it’ll still be dark and the human eye is not so good when it comes to seeing in the dark. So for starters, colorists typically work with a finely tuned color correction monitor in a completely dark room. So if you were to try to watch that episode with the lights on, good fucking luck. More importantly if I recall, the interior scenes for the Battle of Winterfell were a bit brighter than the exterior scenes, and modern TVs do produce a lot of light and all the more so during brighter scenes. So, if you are cutting from a moderately lit interior to a near pitch black exterior and then back to another interior shot, the viewers eyes are not getting enough time to adjust to the dark exteriors to actually see all of the details. And all of that gets compounded by the file compression that happens for streaming (I indeed noticed some convolution errors during the darker shots).

I’ll end my industry inside baseball ramble there. Anyways, go see Barry Lyndon, it’s an absolutely gorgeous period piece and I think it’s one of Kubrick’s most underrated works.

This seems to be what I've learned.