I heard reference to something about how all anime are required to have good looking cabbage because of That One Time. So simply looking up "anime cabbage" I found the source.

Some harem anime way back in the day had an episode where the characters cooked, and they animated cabbage so terribly like this it left a bad mark on the anime community forever. Apparently this is part of the reason why all food usually looks good in anime, even moreso than the regular show sometimes. With cabbage being especially well drawn.

A complaint, apparently in a paper.

The first show when released internationally was reanimated in this part.

And high quality or low quality cabbage is sometimes referenced.

I learned of this because the most recent Hologra episode has noel eating cabbage, tearing apart a fine quality cabbage into two low poly halves.

One of the things that’s really struck me while rereading the Lord of the Rings–knowing much more about Tolkien than I did the last time I read it–is how individual a story it is.

We tend to think of it as a genre story now, I think–because it’s so good, and so unprecedented, that Tolkien accidentally inspired a whole new fantasy culture, which is kind of hilarious. Wanting to “write like Tolkien,” I think, is generally seen as “writing an Epic Fantasy Universe with invented races and geography and history and languages, world-saving quests and dragons and kings.” But… But…

Here’s the thing. I don’t think those elements are at all what make The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings so good. Because I’m realizing, as I did not realize when I was a kid, that Tolkien didn’t use those elements because they’re somehow inherently better than other things. He used them purely because they were what he liked and what he knew.

The Shire exists because he was an Englishman who partially grew up in, and loved, the British countryside, and Hobbits are born out of his very English, very traditionalist values. Tom Bombadil was one of his kids’ toys that he had already invented stories about and then incorporated into Middle-Earth. He wrote about elves and dwarves because he knew elves and dwarves from the old literature/mythology that he’d made his career. The Rohirrim are an expression of the ancient cultures he studied. There are a half-dozen invented languages in Middle-Earth because he was a linguist. The themes of war and loss and corruption were important to him, and were things he knew intimately, because of the point in history during which he lived; and all the morality of the stories, the grace and humility and hope-in-despair, was an expression of his Catholic faith. 

J. R. R. Tolkien created an incredible, beautiful, unparalleled world not specifically by writing about elves and dwarves and linguistics, but by embracing all of his strengths and loves and all the things he best understood, and writing about them with all of his skill and talent. The fact that those things happened to be elves and dwarves and linguistics is what makes Middle-Earth Middle-Earth; but it is not what makes Middle-Earth good.

What makes it good is that every element that went into it was an element J. R. R. Tolkien knew and loved and understood. He brought it out of his scholarship and hobbies and life experience and ideals, and he wrote the story no one else could have written… And did it so well that other people have been trying to write it ever since.

So… I think, if we really want to write like Tolkien (as I do), we shouldn’t specifically be trying to write like linguists, or historical experts, or veterans, or or or… We should try to write like people who’ve gathered all their favorite and most important things together, and are playing with the stuff those things are made of just for the joy of it. We need to write like ourselves.

Come on [tumblr] where’s my Mars Bear fanart?

In my opinion, Bill Watterson deserves way more credit as one of the great paleoartists.

He did not need to go this hard, but he did, and he has my everlasting respect for that.

by @Beetlemoses on twitter

reblog for sample size !!

One of the things that’s important in a long-running RPG is making a memorable plot that attains definitive closure. You don’t want players feeling like they have unfinished business and want to go Do More Things.

So, for instance, say you start dropping hints early on of some sort of epic Magical Badass, like a lich queen or something. Early on, the players don’t find out much; just that there’s someone called Zola who is behind a whole lot of strange shit, and a lot of it is not good. And they are never quite sure what she is. Wizard? Dragon? Lich? But eventually they find out: She has many forms, but her true form is one of the Medusas. Not the modern watered-down species that fall for the mirror crap and you have to meet their gaze, but a true abomination from beyond the veil, whose stare can turn whole armies to stone.

The reason this works as a plot is that the players will never speak to you again once they realize you spent six months building up to the reveal that the big cheese is the legendary gorgon Zola.

[EDIT: I feel vaguely disappointed that this is probably my most popular post ever.]

[NEW EDIT: Okay now that the pornhub joke has 100x as many notes I yearn for the halcyon days when this was it.]

It turns out the cookies are real — sort of.

They are baked at the home of Lara MacLean, who has been a “puppet wrangler” for the Jim Henson Company for almost three decades. MacLean started as an intern for Sesame Workshop in 1992 and has been working for the team ever since.

The recipe, roughly: Pancake mix, puffed rice, Grape-Nuts and instant coffee, with water in the mixture. The chocolate chips are made using hot glue sticks — essentially colored gobs of glue.

The cookies do not have oils, fats or sugars. Those would stain Cookie Monster. They’re edible, but barely. “Kind of like a dog treat,” MacLean says.

Before she reinvented the recipe in the 2000s, the creative team behind “Sesame Street” used versions of rice crackers and foams to make the cookies. The challenge was that the rice crackers would make more of a mess and get stuck in Cookie’s fur. And the foams didn’t look like cookies once they broke apart.

Cookie has been portrayed since 2001 by David Rudman, who took over the role from Frank Oz. Rudman’s right hand moves the mouth, which is eating, and his left hand holds the cookies. Both work in concert to break the cookies, which means they have to be soft enough to fall apart.

Rudman said soft cookies are best, adding, “The more crumbs, the funnier it is. If he eats the cookie, and it only breaks into two pieces if it’s too hard, it’s just not funny,” he said. “It looks almost painful. But if he eats a cookie and it explodes into a hundred crumbs, that’s where the comedy comes from.”

MacLean has perfected a recipe that is “thin enough that it’ll explode into a hundred crumbs,” Rudman said. “But it’s not too thin that it’ll break in my hand when I’m holding it.”

Not every (human) guest realizes that the cookies aren’t meant to be eaten. Adam Sandler appeared on an episode and decided to share in the muppet's delight by spontaneously eating a cookie with him on set.

“As soon as the cameras cut, he was like, ‘Blech!' ” MacLean said.

"what does a TARDIS malfunction sound like?"

"idk just dump the entire goofy sound effects library in the span of 10 seconds. That should do it"

I have way more thoughts than I thought I would about Kung Fu Panda 4

Kung Fu Panda 4 didn't need to exist, we know they did it for money i'm not laboring under the presumption that big animation studios plan their films with any kind of artistic integrity but it really, really didn't need to happen. If they had done something interesting with it, fine, okay, but they didn't. It had so much potential, but it was just. nothing. slightly annoying, unnecessary nothing.

I'm not expecting much from Haha Funney Jack Black Panda Movies, but when you set the standard that 1 and 2 did, and then give us this? Come on, Dreamworks. 1 and 2 had some meaty gravitas to them--and there was buildup to that gravitas. 3 just felt like a retread of 2's theme (it was fine but felt more phoned in); 4 just felt like it could have been a season finale of some low-budget spinoff show that would have been premiering on nickelodeon between movies back in the day.

Po was way more immature and unwilling to accept any kind of maturity or responsibility for his position or actions than he was in the first movie, much less the second or third. Hell, by the end of the second movie, he was still Haha Funney Jack Black Panda but there had been a lot of character development--learning that he finds his greatest strength in being himself and shouldn't run from his responsibility in 1, and accepting and finding peace with his past in 2. In four, he's whiny, avoidant, narcissistic, and just kind of annoying to watch.

Awkwafina's character was...fine. I actually kind of liked her, I wish she'd been in a better movie. I thought she would be annoying but no, she was great, and her design looked much less 'standard disney-fied' in motion alongside everything else.

The Furious Five being conspicuously absent and Lord Shen not saying a word had the exact same energy as the Olympus Coliseum world in Kingdom Hearts 3, when Megara and Phil arrive and Phil is just noticeably silent. Huge "we couldn't/didn't want to bother to get the whole voice cast back" energy.

The script as a whole felt like someone had skimmed the wikipedia plot summary for the prior 3 movies and built the plot from there? --4 implies that there's a direct and necessary process of succession for the Dragon Warrior that results in the previous Warrior becoming spiritual leader of the valley (which felt incredibly arbitrary, Shi Fu doesn't give a single reason why Po needs to be spiritual leader or why it has to happen now, he just insists that it does) but isn't the role of Dragon Warrior in the first movie something that's like...a rare title born of necessity? --When they first see Juniper City, Po says in awe "woah, that's a big village". He's been in a city before. That was the setting for most of the entire second movie. I am losing my mind. Is Po stupid. Did he hit his head really hard sometime between 3 and 4. --Is Kung Fu a martial art or some kind of mystical quantifiable power that can be stolen? Is the Chameleon stealing their knowledge--is kung fu a carefully practiced martial art--or is it actually some spiritual quality she's stealing that lets the characters get to a certain higher level of said carefully practiced martial art???? Hello????

One thing I adored though was the B-plot of the goose and bryan cranston chasing after Po. I adore when kids movies have a comedic B-plot of bumbling parents trying to keep their heroic kids safe, it warms my heart every time. And seeing the concept of Po's family going from a point of unresolved trauma in the 2nd movie to just a funny B-plot in the 4th did feel like a nice extension of the initial trilogy.

I also loved the Chameleon. She didn't have much going for her script-wise, but I loved her entire vibe, her design was stellar, she gave off such Eartha Kitt As Yzma vibes I absolutely adored her. Favorite character of the movie.

But the script did her so dirty. Her motives and backstory were so flimsy you could knock them over by breathing on them, especially considering Mantis, Crane, and Snake exist and were noticeably smaller than she. On the one hand I can see a "she claims that we rejected her because she was small and frail but truly it was because she was plotting to steal our kung fu all along" but on the other hand she doesn't have any meaningful interactions with anyone who would be able to provide that perspective, so occam's razor I'm taking her account at face value since I don't think the scriptwriters intended for anything different. If they had bothered to establish that unreliable narration then maybe Tai Lung could have actually had a role in the plot besides being...there? for some reason? Maybe he could have, faced with someone with very similar ambitions and a very similar chip on her shoulder to his own, fully realized his misdoings and ended up allied with Po for more than about 3 seconds at the tail end.

Anyway, all in all, a resounding "meh". I'm not even going to bother getting it on DVD like I am with the other kung fu panda movies. It's just kinda not worth it. The first 2 (and maybe 3? I forgot most of 3 tbh) were such a good demonstration of how compelling children's animation can be, and this one is a good demonstration of how much you can phone in a children's animation.

when i showed this to my friends they didn’t believe me that sonic had a sword in one game

I hate how people will look at popular indie artists who had one or two songs go viral on TikTok and start making fun of anybody who listens to them. "Oh you listen to Lemon Demon, Will Wood, Jack Stauber, Glass Animals, and Mother Mother? Tsk, don't you know that is stupid TikTok neurodivergent white transmasc preteen music? It's so mid and bad you should listen to real music–" you are a pit of misery

things i’ll not call you a whore for:

sexual activity

how you dress

things i’ll call you a whore for:

stealing my food 

stealing my lemons

my cat likes you more than me

I love the term nothingburger so much. It sums up so many things. Like. Yeah I don't like [thing] but there's nothing really wrong with it, it just has absolutely 0 substance, it's an absolute nothingburger of a [thing], the world isn't worse for its existence but it isn't better either