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fruitcoops · 3 years

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MY LORD WE NEED A LILY REMUS AND REGULAS FRIENDSHIP - imagine the chaos all of them just talking so fast over something they’re exited about - and pots cap and the team just stand their like wtf

I love this ask!!! I combined it with the one below because they just fit SO well. Send your prayers to Kasey, everyone <3 Sweater Weather credit goes to @lumosinlove!

Anon 1: Loops nerding out on something (stars and planets) and unloading shit ton of knowledge to Sirius. Sirius is just there sitting and smiling (because LOOK AT MY SMART BOYFRIEND!!! ) but also actively listening to it and asking questions and doubts. that just meeelttts Loops’s heart because nobody actually listens this intently or are even interested in Astronomy

To say Kasey was lost was…an understatement. The Triplets of Terror had been talking for well over thirty minutes; their trains of thought were fully off the rails and had ground his own little mining cart of a thought process into dust about twenty minutes prior.

Thankfully, he wasn’t alone—Logan and Finn had given up to play Candy Crush on their phones while Leo napped, and most of the other guys had straight-up left the room, not that the triplets would notice.

Sirius and Pots on the other hand, had never been more whipped.

“—and then they had to change the battery type for the new rover!” Remus was saying as he flailed his hand around in excitement. Lily nodded along, but Regulus made a timeout motion.

“Wait, didn’t they redesign the entire thing?” he asked, looking to Kasey as if he had any clue what topic they had moved on to.

Kasey shrugged. “Perseverance was supposed to be the better version of Opportunity, right?”

From the looks on their faces, he may as well have admitted he was a serial killer. “Bliz,” Lily said indignantly. “Are you trying to say something about Oppy?”

“Because if you are, you need to sit your ass down and learn some shit.” Regulus narrowed his eyes and took a deep breath. Kasey died a little inside. “Both of the Mars rovers are meant to take pictures and samples of the landscape—”

“—but in different ways,” Remus finished. Regulus didn’t bat an eye, though Kasey was pretty sure that if anyone else had interrupted him, they would’ve lost an eye. “And when Oppy’s battery pack died, they knew she still had valuable information and that they would need another rover to collect what they couldn’t bring back from her.”

“Which is where Percy comes in,” Lily said, as if it was obvious. “James, you’ve been watching the livestreams with me. Kasey’s wrong, right?”

James hummed his agreement, though Kasey was willing to bet he wasn’t registering a single word she said. “You’re so smart, honey.”

“What do you think they’ll do next?” Remus asked, his eyes getting the same unfocused look they did when the topic was about to do a 180-degree turn. “Like, we can’t land rovers on stars yet, but it would be pretty cool if we could plot constellations in 3D models.”

“That would be awesome,” Regulus whispered.

Sirius snorted. “The family would go batshit over that, Reg. Can you imagine how insufferable they’d be?”

“Ugh, you’re right.” Regulus wrinkled his nose. “Do we sacrifice science for even more status symbols?”

“No,” Remus and Lily said at the same time. Kasey settled back into his chair and closed his eyes; maybe he could fit a nap in while they talked.

Something smacked his foot lightly and he cracked open an eye to see both James and Sirius giving him disbelieving looks. Listen, James mouthed, gesturing to the triplets as they chatted at light speed about the origins of planet names.

“I’m telling you, Re, it should’ve been named Helios!” Regulus sighed.

“I don’t care if it’s a star, the sun is the sun and it deserves its own special name!” Remus argued. “Besides, Helios is already a system. If we were keeping with naming conventions—”

“Who cares about naming conventions?” Lily grumbled. “Pick the one that sounds the best so people remember it.”

“If we were keeping with naming conventions,” Remus continued aggressively. “The sun would have been named Apollo, and that just sounds lame next to everything else.”

There was a beat of blessed silence.

Lily bit her lip. “You’re not wrong.”

“Of course he’s not,” Sirius scoffed, still looking at Remus like he hung the stars.

“Love you too, babes” Remus leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. He practically glowed with happiness.

“Apollo isn’t lame!” Finn piped up from his couch with a frown. “Apollo is the coolest of the pantheon!”

“Which pantheon?”

“Both!”

All three rolled their eyes at the same time and James stifled a laugh in Sirius’ shoulder. “Haven’t you guys talked about this before?” he asked, bemused.

“Yes,” they chorused.

“The consensus was Athena and we’re not talking criticism,” Regulus said.

“War goddess, strategist, artist, engineer.” Remus counted off on his fingers. “She checks all the boxes.”

“And she’s a badass,” Lily added. “If Athena is in a myth, it’s gonna be good. Oh, we should do that for Halloween this year.”

Remus raised an eyebrow. “Dress up as Athena?”

“No, the gods.”

Regulus nodded slowly. “That could be cool. Dibs on Persephone.”

“Not Hades?”

“Nah. I’m not emo enough for that.”

Lily and Remus’ instant disagreements were lost in the explosion of laughter from everyone left in the room. Kasey leaned back into the cushions and prepared himself for a long, long afternoon.

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davidmann95 · 4 years

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Hey David? Why is ours such a cruel and merciless God?

mirrorfalls said: (If you don't know what I'm talking about, your inbox should be filling up with more specific deets riiiiight about now.)

cheerfullynihilistic said: THE SNYDER CUT

Anonymous said: You don’t seem to think Superman’s public rep will take another beating from the Snyder Cut coming out. Honestly I thought you’d be way more upset than you seemed on Twitter.

Anonymous said: So uhh, against all thoughts and logic the Snyder cut is being released? Maybe as a mini series? Thoughts?

Anonymous said: SNYDER CUT!

Bullies. Jocks. Guys angrily asking if we know who their father is. Assorted dudebro nerd-oppressors of America:

You have failed us. You have failed us so hard. What else do we even keep you around for if not to head this shit off at the pass? Shame on you.

Okay, so seriously: I’m actually gonna put most bitching and moaning under a cut, because I know firsthand there are as many as several non-slavering maniacs out there who dug Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and who are simply and entirely reasonably excited that they’re getting this movie after all. I don’t feel like throwing a wall of text at them shitting all over this, so I’ll lead off with I think some fairly even-handed commentary on the real-world circumstances here, rambling speculation regarding the production, and some cautious optimism about the actual movie/s. THEN I’ll get to what I imagine most of you are here to see.

So totally in a vacuum: this is a cool, good thing. I’m the notorious theatrical Justice League-liker, but at best it was a compromised product due to the original creator - who like it or not clearly had an incredibly ambitious personal vision for these characters and their world - suffering a horrific tragedy forcing him off the project, and leaving his final stamp on blockbuster culture and a world he’d devoted years of his life to a flop with his name on it when he couldn’t even truly call it his own anymore. At worst, said tragedy was taken advantage of by suits to ditch him in the home stretch so as to try and shove out something ostensibly more marketable. But now because of a...very loyal fanbase, the man’s getting the opportunity and resources to rise like a phoenix and see at least some of his vision through in a huge way. That’s pretty remarkable.

Not in a vacuum this is fucking horrifying. I’ve already seen folks poo-poohing the reflexive fears that this will ‘set a precedent’, and they were right enough that I deleted my initial tweet on the subject because I didn’t think I could express my own opinion with any nuance in the space of 280 characters. Yeah, nerd whining definitely shaped Rise of Skywalker (another movie I enjoyed in spite of the circumstances of its creation). Hell, Sonic the Hedgehog crunched its CGI team prior to unceremoniously firing them to redesign his model thanks to outcry. That’s already a market force, and just to be clear upfront, if we can’t agree the predominant mode of operation for #ReleaseTheSnyderCut has been a toxic nerd harassment campaign when they spammed posts memorializing deceased actors and chased Diane Nelson off Twitter, we’re not gonna be able to have this conversation. And director’s cuts are you may have noticed also already a thing. But this isn’t changing direction on a project that’s already going to exist no matter what, this is turning back 3 years later on a commercial flop and dumping tens of millions of dollars into it, explicitly in response to that harassment campaign. It’s not *actually* going back and, say, remaking The Last Jedi, but by god to the naked eye it’s gonna be as good as for plenty of fanboys, and probably to some shortsighted execs as well. This is a new thing, and in this context it is a very, very bad one. Hopefully one that won’t amount to anything.

As for the movie itself: what the hell is this thing going to end up being? I assume with this sort of cashola being pumped into it we’re not getting any slapdash greenscreen or storyboarded sequences, but four hours? Is it really just going to be an expanded and revised version of what we saw in theaters, or is this including content that would have been in the originally planned Justice Leagues 2 and 3? My understanding is that those were already compressed into a single Justice League 2 before plans collapsed altogether, were they maybe filming side-by-side and this’ll be the whole shebang? If not is Snyder going to hedge his bets and end this on a clean note, or keep it ending on a cliffhanger in hopes HBO will throw another $250 million his way to keep going? Does DC want to keep going? Would they give into fan pressure on releasing after all what was widely publicized as the first film of a duology or trilogy with dangling threads if they weren’t going to be at least watching the numbers to see the feasibility of returning to this in a bigger way? Not that I think WB execs would piss into Snyder’s mouth if he were dying of thirst at this point if he simply asked to be able to do Justice League 2, but if he floated that if they instead just give him a liiiiiiiitle more money he can finally deliver unto them their very own Avengers - one that they can work on even during quarantine since it’s mostly just VFX work left - and hey if it works out he’s got a sequel or two cued up and ready to go? Maybe they look at their scattered plans and say the hell with it and end up giving this a theatrical release and sequel with Snyder holding the reigns again if this ends up a killer app; stranger things have happened, if not many, and somehow this is already happening in the first place after all. Alternatively, if this succeeds, could they go “thanks and good on ya, totally do another, but it’s gonna be an HBO exclusive so you’re only getting a hundred million, figure it out”? Would Ben Affleck return? How much reshooting will he be willing to commit to even for this? And most importantly, since this is potentially going to be serialized as six ‘episodes’, will We Got This Covered count this as another ‘win’ since their bullshit rumor mill algorithm spit out “Justice League HBO TV show” recently?

As for the project itself: I ain’t subscribing to HBOMax for this bad boy, but once it becomes more widely available I can’t claim I won’t probably watch it. It’s basically a new movie about the Justice League, and if there’s anything I WOULD wanna see Zack Snyder do in the DCU, it’s the movie finally moving past pseudo-realism (aside from some of those dopey costumes) and leaning all the way into godlike superbeings bludgeoning each other through continents. I absolutely wanna see his aesthetic take on the Green Lantern Corps, and New Genesis, and time travel, and all the other weird promises of where his movies were going to go climaxing in a ridiculous super-war across all spacetime. It’s the same reason J.G. Jones was an exciting choice for Final Crisis before he had to leave, seeing a guy known for his work in an ultra-real grungy superhero style starting there and building up to seeing his version of absolutely wild cosmic spectacle. And no, to respond to one of the initial asks, I’m not worried about the impact on Superman. Everyone seems to have accepted this is its own distinct thing whether they like it or not, I think him getting to complete his ‘arc’ will quiet down many of the folks who like to yell at every other version as retro nonsense since now they’ll be able to be smug about having had the best take rather than pining for a lost finale, and I’m not interested in further Superman movies at the moment anyway with Superman & Lois in the pipe (which I was originally paranoid would be endangered by this when rumors first started floating, but if it’s been brewing since November then if they wanted to strike that down to ‘make room’ according to their Byzantine ever-shifting rules, they would have by now). Far as I’m concerned, as long as the other DC movies get to keep doing what they’re doing during and past this - even Pattinson in his corner, however that works - then totally let Snyder work out all his Wagnerian superhero bullshit for another flick or two. If nothing else, maybe we’ll learn what the hell that diagram up there is supposed to mean. And a plea I want to clarify upfront is wholeheartedly sincere: we’re already down the rabbit hole, so let Snyder to literally whatever he wants with his non-theatrically released Justice League. Zero input or veto power from outside parties. If he wants Flash to hang dong or Superman to say fuck or Batman to learn he’s Steppenwolf’s secret dad or Cyborg to learn he needs to eat babies to fuel his machine parts, let him go for it. Whole point is this is now his thing for people who want his thing.

Okay, beneath the cut the filter comes off, so go ahead if that’s your jam.

Hahahahahahaha this is gonna be such a fuckin’ shitshow you guys, Jesus Christ.

They’re giving the dude who did BvS and wants to make an Ayn Rand adaptation someday $30 million to take another crack at this monstrosity! 30 goddamn million smackaroos for four fucking hours of by many accounts roughly the same basic movie, except now presumably with what little coherency, fun, and clean character work the theatrical cut managed to pull off excised in return for weighty staring, ponderous pseudo-philosophical musings, hackneyed symbolism, aimless mythology teasing, and Steppenwolf I understand being decapitated by Wonder Woman at the end rather than taken back to Apokolips. I didn’t even spoiler mark that shit because don’t you dare pretend you care about the fate of Steppenwolf. I won’t have it.

I used to wonder if I was indeed missing the forest for the trees with these movies, that I was so inflexible in my personal image of these characters - even though I appreciate plenty of alternate takes on them and even some stories that bend or break what I consider their ‘rules’, just not these - that I was incapable of grasping or appreciating these films on their own merits as works of art using those archetypes in wildly different ways; even I could see there were good moments and interesting ideas on display despite seemingly failing to come together. No matter how much I personally deconstructed how and why it wasn’t working, I couldn’t do it to my own satisfaction to the point of stamping out that niggling little worry with how many folks whose opinions I respect love ‘em. Until I finally remembered that the Cadmus arc of Justice League Unlimited is totally the same basic story as BvS, centrally driven by an even worse take on Superman, and that’s still one of the best superhero stories of all time. These just stink by any merits, and while I think Justice League absolutely has the potential to be the most *entertaining* of the bunch, it’s not going to magically become *good* in the eleventh hour. Not to lift up Joss Whedon of all people as some kind of savior, I’m on the record that my love for Justice League as-is is some kind of inexplicable alchemical accident, but I promise that there is not going to be one single addition to this movie that’s going to make up for the removal of “Just save one person”.

Also I’m already not looking forward to dudes tweeting “whoa, he’s splitting it up into a serialized narrative, reflective of the sequential nature of the characters’ primitive native pictorial medium! Or mayhap in ode to the pulp film adventure serials which inspired those in turn! Even the Justice League children’s cartoon for dumb babies, which was itself...made up of episodes! That’s three references in the structure of the thing alone! The man’s operating on an entirely different level!” “God, isn’t it amazing how much better he understands the source material than you”, they shall say, about a man who I understand just very confidently referred to Doomsday in his livestream as having destroyed Krypton in the comics. Again, don’t you say they won’t, just the other day I saw folks tweeting they just realized that since Jor-El wears armor over his bodysuit that technically means Superman’s whole costume is underwear which means Snyder’s totally honoring that without putting him in ugly dumb red panties so checkmate, dorks.

(Okay, in fairness, I know Snyder was saying that’s his take on what happened to the moon in the past of the movies and maybe I only misheard that he thought that also happened in the comics, and it’s trivial information anyway. Still sucks though, that seeming out-of-nowhere Jax-Ur shoutout was like the one thing I liked about that otherwise interminable Krypton sequence. And why is there a second Doomsday? You did Death of Superman already!)

And further SPOILER thoughts below on the reported plots of 2 and 3:

It’s also an amazing, perfect sort of narrative synchronicity that the hypocrisy of Man of Steel in presenting Superman as a savior would (will?) be matched by the movies also rejecting that promise long-term. In there, Jor-El’s musings on the capacity of every living thing being capable of good, the closest the film has to a singular moral statement, are proven wrong when Zod has to be put down like a mad dog, and rather than the one who’ll bring us into the sun, Kal-El’s presence draws ruin from beyond the stars to our world. And again in BvS with Doomsday. And again in Justice League 1-3, where in spite of claims by Snydercutters that it’s okay for Superman to be a really lousy take on Superman because it’s totally supposed to take several movies after putting on the costume and calling himself Superman, including his own death and resurrection, for him to really, like, become Superman, man, he remains a liability to the end. His death lures in Steppenwolf, the Kryponian matrix in his genes is Darkseid’s goal, he becomes the villain of the first act of Justice League 3 - possibly of his own free will depending on which version you’ve heard about - and at the final showdown, it’s Batman who sacrifices himself to stop Darkseid and save the world and inspire the rise of superheroism, because Batman, you see, rules, whereas Superman, stay with me here, drools. A letdown given BvS was just about the one major story of the last 30 years to unambiguously conclude Superman is better than Batman, but not a shocker. None of what I understand goes down in these - iconography from the likes of Fourth World, Crisis on Infinite Earths, Death and Return of Superman, Rock of Ages, Final Crisis, and Injustice reused but stripped of all context and thematic weight that gives it meaning (even Injustice is built on the premise of having a ‘good’ Superman to contrast the dictator); Lois being the ‘key’ because of her connections to two men, one she married and one she bears; time travel that even by the very generous suspension of disbelief applied to it in a genre like this operates by two obviously completely different sets of rules in its only two uses, and is then used to write the entire second movie of the trilogy out of continuity in the first act of the third, making one and a half of these movies pointless - is shocking. It’s just more empty notions and unfulfilled promises offered up to a fanbase staking everything on the idea that all the tampering, all the wild swings, all the meandering, it’s all building UP to something, not possibly just a dude who doesn’t understand these characters but wanting to look very clever with them before building up to one more rad punch-up. So yes, make these movies. Let what can be gleaned from them as worthwhile be revealed, leave the rest of it up for examination to be judged as it deserves and let it, finally. Finally. Be done.

#Justice League #Snyder Cut #Zack Snyder #DCEU #Worlds of DC #Superman #Man of Steel #Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice #Superman & Lois #DCTV #Analysis #Opinion

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goldenchildkatsuki · 6 years

Text

MY FINGERS ARE PINK

a kacchako drabble

Summary: It's July, the villains have stayed put, they're bored, why not dye their hair and shave their heads?

Writers note: As I have stated on Tumblr I was taking a slight break from writing since I'm in the middle of exam period. It's been two weeks since I said that and boy have I missed writing about these two. Though my exams aren't over yet I decided to write this drabble about them that I came up with months ago. I was watching Jenna and Julien on Youtube, back on their usual beauty salon bullshit and I thought "Huh, this is cute." So here we are.Hope you enjoy, I'll be back with more uploads soon.

Word count: 2.390

AO3 link: (x)

He had been looking at the kit for a while but reading it over and over made him even more confused. The longer he stared at the small white letters on the black box the more he regretted even buying the damn high end product.

“This is going to be a nightmare.” Bakugou mumbled as he scratched his ear that got tickled by the strands of hair brushing it when falling to the ground.

Uraraka didn’t respond.

The buzzing sound was too loud, and she didn’t hear quite well to begin with.

Bakugou scraped his throat and repeated his sentence, this time louder.

He felt the clippers coming of his scalp and she poked her head over his shoulder.

“You said something?”

“I said this is going to be a fucking nightmare.” Bakugou repeated for the third time.

He hung his head and felt the air of the fan blowing against his head. It felt strange, it sent chills down his spine. Bakugou didn’t feel that anxious when he saw all his hair on the ground but now that he could feel that it was gone, it was a different story.

Bakugou had no idea how he was going to look, he could go and feel the back of his head, but he was sure Uraraka would tap it away. She herself had been almost completely silent the entire time she was doing his hair. Not the slightest squeal or hitch in breath could show how she thought about how he looked right now.

Maybe she didn’t feel anything. Bakugou had been moaning about doing it for so long and every time he did Uraraka stated she was certain it would suit him. He never ended up doing it, even though he kept complaining about how untamable it was getting and how hot it was. Maybe she saw what she expected and couldn’t get out a notable reaction.

“You’re not the one having to do it.” Uraraka laughed as she gently pushed his head a little more upwards.

“But I’m going to be the one helping, which in our case is basically the same as doing it by myself.”

“It’s your fault then for wanting to take things over all the time!”

“Is not!”

Bakugou could feel Uraraka smiling above him and he couldn’t help but to crack one himself. Though he was determined it was indeed going to be one hell of a paint job, he was determined Uraraka was going to look good with pink ends. At first, he was not feeling it at all. He had fallen in love and gotten so used to her chestnut colored hair, that he could barely even imagine it. Not only that but Bakugou was convinced it was just one of the impulses that came with Uraraka’s current mood.

Since they moved to a different area, a more rural one, it had been quiet. Quieter than they expected. Even when they went to their agencies in town they were disappointed by how little there was to do. It may have been the wave of new and upcoming heroes fresh out of high school or it may just be that villains also couldn’t be bothered to commit crimes in this scorching heat. Whatever the reason was, it left both of them with too much free time on their hands.

And whilst Bakugou seemed to be filling that up redesigning his costume and looking through applicants for his agency, Uraraka had got bored with redecorating their new apartment and had been doing things on impulse.

They now had three guppies.

There was a half-deflated children’s pool with snorkeling gear at the bottom on their balcony.

And Bakugou’s white sneakers now had drawings on them.

Bakugou had tried to not get angry at her, he kind of understood her after all. It was frustration that laid deep and it just managed to express itself in that way.

But really, his white sneakers?

This time he had fallen victim to her impulse and he was getting and undercut done by Uraraka. He couldn’t really say he fell victim, he wanted this done for a long time after all. The thing was that Uraraka had never shaved heads before. She never dyed her hair either.

At this point it was whatever and he just hoped that after this Uraraka would have peaked and look through the applicants with him or something. Something he had asked her to do from the moment he brought the insanely high stacks of paper into their home. He valued Uraraka’s opinion a lot and knew she saw things he easily overlooked. Believe it or not she was even stricter than he was when it came to that sort of thing. But Uraraka decided that naming their guppies in that moment was evidently more important than paper work.

Uraraka turned off the clippers for a minute and took a deep breath. Bakugou took the opportunity to stand up and stretch his limbs out. He watched Uraraka walk to the kitchen and open the fridge to bring out a giant jug of lemonade. She poured two cups of them, added sugar to one and pushed the other closer to the edge of the kitchen counter.

Bakugou walked up to the glass and downed it in one go. He poured himself another glass and leaned against the fridge, sighing as it barely cooled his sticky back. He looked at Uraraka who looked very gleeful.

“What?” Bakugou scowled.

“Nothing.” Uraraka turned her head away from him.

“Don’t do that, you know I hate that.”

Bakugou reached out his hand to take her face and turn it back to him. The girl waved it away and took another sip of her lemonade before speaking.

“You just look really handsome like that.” She exhaled.

Bakugou shook his head and rolled his eyes at her. “Fuck off.”

The girl pointed her nose in the air. “That’s why I didn’t want to say anything. You can’t take a compliment!”

He gently kicked her shin with his foot. “You should know by now that that’s how I take compliments.”

Uraraka chuckled, put her glass down and walked back to the living area. “By telling people to fuck off?”

Bakugou wiped the sweat of his forehead with his t-shirt and followed Uraraka. “Yes!”

He sat back down in the chair and pressed down the sappy feeling that was starting to emerge. Though he was more than allowed to feel flustered when his girlfriend complimented him, he would rather avoid becoming that ‘soft’. Preferably by sampling thinking;

Of course, he looks handsome.

What did she expect?

He could rock a purple wig if he wanted to.

No doubt in his mind.

Though it was good to know still, that she thought that.

Uraraka turned on the clippers and quickly cleaned him up. When she turned off the clippers for the last time she immediately went to the bathroom to fetch him a mirror. She went to stand before him and handed him the hand mirror.

Bakugou slightly jumped when seeing the new version of himself. Was it even a new version of himself? He had a hard time recognizing the person in the mirror to be honest. He was still incredibly satisfied with the result though. Bakugou knew that he didn’t have to doubt Uraraka too much. She wouldn’t have sat him down if she knew she really couldn’t pull it off.

He felt the back and the side of his head and the tiny hairs pricked his hands. A quick ruffle through the bush of hair at the front and it looked exactly like he wanted it to look.

“This is some barber’s shit right here.” Bakugou grinned.

“Better pay me the barber’s fees then.”

“How about I hand you my pillow if you’re out of cool sides on yours.”

Uraraka hummed as she disconnected the clippers.

“That’s probably worth more than what I was about to ask for.” She said.

Bakugou threw the mirror on the carpet and grabbed the box of pink hair dye off the coffee table. He waved it in front of Uraraka.

“Your turn.”

She took the box out of his hands and took her hair out of a bun. The ends fell over her shoulders and Bakugou noticed it had started growing over her clavicles. He liked that it had got long. He had always wondered what she would look like with longer hair since they were still in high school.

He followed her into the bathroom and sat her down in front of the big mirror. She threw her hair back, handed Bakugou her hair brush. He took a handful of hair and carefully brushed all the knots now.

If his sixteen-year-old self would see him now he would be stunned to the core.

But what could he say. She was shit at combing out her knots, and he already said he was going to help her at some point.

Bakugou heard her mumbling the instructions beneath him and she also seemed to be as confused as he was. It was likely that they were just going to give it a go and see where it ended up. Like most things nowadays. He was still angry at every single adult that didn’t tell him how hard this type of shit was.

Buying furniture? Taxes? Dyeing your girlfriends hair?

Yeah, it was more difficult than he expected.

Uraraka opened the box and wore the black gloves, secured them with hair ties that she left in the sink. She handed Bakugou the second pair of spare gloves she had taken out of the kitchen drawer after he was just about done.

They stared in the mirror and couldn’t help but laugh at themselves.

What in the world where they doing?

Trying, he guessed.

Trying to pass time as the responsible and serious adults they were.

His girlfriend fanned her face and tried to calm herself down. She bent forwards to take a bowl and brush she had bought in a beauty salon.

She lifted the two items to either side of her face “So what now?”

“Not a single fucking clue.”

“It tells me how to dye my whole head pink but nothing about just parts so I’m saying we just go in there.”

Uraraka threw the brush on the ground and took a tube of paint, which she started squirting the contents of in the bowl and lifted it above her head.

Bakugou quickly took a towel from the edge of the tub and put it around her shoulders. Then he proceeded to dip his fingers in the paint and stared at her in the mirror with an unsure look on his face.

She nodded at him, dipped her own fingers in paint and started massaging pink into her brown locks.

This could not be right at all. Hairdressers probably couldn’t help but panic if they saw what they were doing but on the other hand, he had no idea how else they were supposed to do it. So, he continued to do the same as Uraraka and helped her dye the back of her head.

He could feel tiny splashes of paint on his face and prayed that this wouldn’t leave his face as pink as Uraraka’s cheeks by the end of it. But he just had to make sure every single hair was properly dyed, so he continued to lightly splatter himself.

The activity wasn’t as time-consuming as he thought it would be and it didn’t take long for them to use both tubes of paint on Uraraka’s ends.

Now the waiting, that seemed to last forever. Bakugou knew he was impatient but forty minutes seemed to last a lifetime. Neither of them could touch anything. He couldn’t hold her face and squish her red and puffy cheeks for entertainment purposes, he couldn’t even get them any drinks seeing as they couldn’t take the gloves off just yet.

They just had to hang in the bathroom. Uraraka lying over the sink and Bakugou lying on the bathroom floor, both cooking in the bathroom that was one of the hottest spaces in the apartment, almost equal to a sauna, with conveniently one of the tiniest windows, that could only be cracked open slightly.

At least they had time to decide on what to eat for dinner that night.

After they decided that, they complained about how unreal the amount they were sweating was until, finally, the forty minutes were over.

Uraraka stood up and Bakugou kicked the chair until in turned all the way around. She sat down again, and he turned on the faucet with the palm off his hand. He thoroughly washed out the hair dye and was careful not to splash any water over the ridge.

“This better not stain the sink.”

“Don’t worry.”

Bakugou probably washed it out more times than needed and just when he was about to turn off the faucet, Uraraka opened her eyes.

“I’ll finish up.”

She wanted to surprise him of course. Even though he wasn’t a big fan of surprises at all, he let her do her thing. He left the bathroom, peeled of his gloves to throw them away in the trashcan in the kitchen.

Bakugou looked at his hands.

Well, their sink was definitely fucked.

He tried to wash his hands and tried to cool himself down by letting the cold water run over his wrists. Nothing helped. He kept listening to the sound of the hairdryer and kept scrubbing and soaking his writs until it fell silent.

“You can come back now!” he heard her chirp.

Bakugou speed walked back to the bathroom and opened the door that was shut to a creek. He saw her standing in the middle of the bathroom with a hair tie between her rosy lips and brushing the ends of her hair. The ends were colored like the punch at prom. Or more like the bubblegum she loved to chew. Whatever the color was, it looked stunning on her. He didn’t think it was possible for her to look even more bad ass than she already did. He didn’t think it was possible for him to adore her even more.

Bakugou rubbed his chin. “Well shit.”

“Is that a good kind of ‘shit’?”

“Oh very.”

#kacchako #bakuraka #bnha #bakugou x uraraka #uraraka x bakugou #kacchako fic #kacchako fanfic #kacchako fanfiction #bakugou #bakugou katsuki #uraraka #uraraka ochako #boku no hero #boku no hero academia #mha #my hero academia #jj writes

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kendrixtermina · 7 years

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Baby Reacts to: “Voltron Legendary Defender”

I’m not familiar with either of the show’s previous incarnations but from what I’ve heard they completely overhauled the characters anyways - supposedly Pidge was once an annoying tagalong kid (and a boy), Keith was a standard issue “hot-blooded mecha pilot”, Shiro was not there, or killed of in the first storyarc, and Allura was a completely different character with a wholly different design, more of a ‘princess classic’ with the looks & personality to macth, supposedly they redesigned her to make her more alien & then threw in the skintone as a hommage to her voice actress. In any case only the name is the same.

I’ve seen some clips and it seems they had a much more outwardly fantasy-aesthetic going on with carriages & period costume, sort of more like Star Wars or Sailor Moon, whereas the newest version seems roughly Star Craft esque in terms of their particular blend of Magitek.

Otherwise it’s pretty straighforward: Evil Empire, Ancient Artifacts, Giant Robots, Space Fights, timefrozen hightech city left behind by the precursors etc.

The evil empire has a renegate splinter faction but that too isn’t so exceptional (though welcome), the BoM reminded me somewhat of the Tok’Ra from Stargate in their reclusive, slow-to-act approach in that they have tons of futuristic tech but limited ressources & had to be won over first & there still being a lot of mutual distrust on both sides, at least at first.

Rare in this day and age (and very refreshingly IMHO) the show unapologetically sticks to the basic genre & tropes without falling over its own feet trying to be clever & meta - sure, they evened out the gender ratio a bit & made the structure of the battles less monotonous but we’re not beaten over the head with any of these things/fit them in naturally & the show never seems like it has something to prove & just lets its story be a straightforward giant robots & explosions kinda thing.

It helps that the artwork is great.

The best summary of my general impression is that I’ll pobably tune in for season 3. My favorite character so far would be Keith closely followed by Pidge, and Shiro, but AFAIK everyone likes Shiro? I’m prolly b/c I’ve heard it’s terrible (The Umbridge effect is probably in full force...) also I’ve been told there’s a trailer out and I’d rather see season 3 unspoiled.

Clearly there needs to be some payoff for Shiro grooming Keith as a potential sucessor but I’m hoping that after a few drama-filled episodes, they all go rescue Shiro from wherever he’s gotten to, Keith hands him back his helmet and they all go home together. I mean, he just got his own Bayard. It’s unclear what happened to him in any case, perhaps he was absorben Evangelion style.

That said one of the show’s strenghts is the clear aversion of the “annoying comedic sidekick” even though it has many characters that has could theoritically fit that description - They try their best to give each of the characters something to do & various skills & likeable traits - Like you get why each of them is there and why they’re our heroes - they also took the time to make sure everyone got a few character establishing moment in the first episode (Shiro’s arrival, Pidge & Keith were already on their own quests by their own means, Hunk & Lance served as the PoV characters etc) and throughout the show they try to bring out everyone’s personalities through reaction shots etc. Like, ALL of them are awesome.

Also apparently this fandom has brutal shipping wars? Some ppl I was sitting next to kept cracking jokes about how [random yaoi pair] was obvliously into each other and after a while it got annoying through sheer persistence.

I don’t think the show as a whole is going for that like if there was going to be a decent/central romantic subplot they’d have introduced it by now they seem to be content to simply be an action show & there’s not much content like that at all except for the occassional teasing for the sake of humor & Lance’s flirting (which is really more there to exposition his being a bit of a showoff) - the most that will come out of it is that when we see some epilogue telling us what became of everyone, Lance will be shown to have found a girlfriend after returning home to his mom & impressing his siblings with his heroic stories.

To begin with they seem to be going for a different vibe with the main characters, with how all of them (including Allura) refer to each other as “family” or “brothers” all the time like I get the impression we’re supposed to interpret them more as simply comerades or quasi-siblings with Shiro as the big brother and Coran as the kooky uncle.

Like I hate it when ppl dismiss already existing romantic subplots as “uneccesary”, “silly” or “pandering” but at the same time it’s not like every show needs to have one or like it immediately needs an explanation when one character doesn’t get a love interest(that they must be gay, ace etc... nothing wrong with those type of characters, or headcanon, but “we’re not doing romance genre RN/ the characters are busy fighting a war” should be a sufficient explanation in and of itself whatever the characters’ orientations are.)

General Character Impressions:

Their secret seems to be rolling with the basic tropes but connecting them into an interesting structre, so it comes off neither overly in your face nor one dimensional.

Lance - ‘Average Joe Relatable PoV character’ except they made him not-boring by making him the snarky/funny one & giving (he’s got ice powers & is the designated long range fighter, both very cool powers, pun not intended but retroactively appreciated) as well as drawing logical consequences (He’s the most attached to earth because of his relatively ‘normal’ background & wants to prove himself because it seems he was the midle child among numerous siblings, hence the rivalry with the local ace pilot.) Sorta calls to mind the likes of Kyon from Haruhi or Sokka from Avatar.

Hunk - For once the “all around nice heart of the group with the more intuitive, roundabout type of reasoning” isn’t the token girl but I’m glad that role’s still there because niceness & group cohesion is a valid attribute. The “nice person” is typically the healer or magic user but making them the defensive fighter makes just as much sense, especially with his personality as the more cautions common sense-y one who becomes committed to the mission through the desire to protect innocents.

Pidge - The “secretly a girl” thing is kinda trite but it makes sense as a reference to the original and they still eschewed the tropes by how she was badass well before & doesn’t get treated any different afterwards - The plot twist is more that she’s related to the scientists from the prologue. Otherwise another potential spirit animal of mine, VERY relatable in ways I can’t count, fro the nerdy reactions all the way to the short stubby arms XD I’m also grateful that they didn’t give us that trite old “nature vs science” contrast but instead portrayed these as connected. It’s like Kensuke from Evangelion, except as a girl & she actually got to be a pilot.

Keith - The Rival Character. Second-best fighter of the paladins, sort of a ‘larger-than-life’ superhumanly good ace pilot, to Lance’s ongoing chagrin (and indeed he turns out to be part warrior alien), also, predictably, the local cynic. Seems to have the least ties to earth/ have been looking for a purpose in life anyways. Not quite a ‘stoic number two’ though - He’d probably like to be but he absolutely doesn’t really know when to shelf it, hence his being highly suceptible to Lance’s provocations & flunking out because of a “discipline issue” despite his aparent talent.

Shiro - Former Ace Pilot & personal hero for both Lance & Keith. Got alien abducted & subjected to the full repertoire (gladiator fights, experimented on, augmented etc.) & is understandeably still rather shook from it. Serious disciplined military type & natural leader, hence ends up taking over almost immediately wheen stranded with a bunch of ragtag space cadet rejects and, as a result, becomes everyone’s beloved big brother figure./mentor. Supposedly just as loved by the fandom? Actually still pretty young, he just looks mature in comparison to the others but he’s not above getting in a snowfight.

Allura - There’s the “sweet princess classic”, the “fierce alien warrior princess” and the “glittery plot magic princess” and in Allura’s case they seem to have been thrown in a blender & put together in such a fashion as to make a more complicated character - She’s certainly fierce, somewhat agressive, suspicious & hellbent on her mission but she also has the diplomatic grace one would expect of a royal & ultimately she does have a sweet side (hinted at early on with her adorable animal companions) - The basic gist of it is that she’s a regular teenage girl somewhere, but has been trained for asskicking & diplomacy all her life, & now she’s the last survivor & feels the pressure to carry on her father’s torch & stop the evil empire so she affects a comanding presence most of the time.

Also there seems to be some meme about calling her a racist (Ugh tumblr) ? This seems to me as one of this stuations where people want complex characters but cannot handle it if they’re not perfect or fitting into easy boxes.

The whole point of her is that she comes from a different time & culture with it’s conlicts outside of the human character’s PoVs. Like point me at any angry alien princess who is NOT suspicious. Both being unfrozen and heck, even Zarkon’s betrayal are still relatively recent for her, and in the end she was just kinda avoiding Keith (granted, in what must’ve been a confusing uncertain time for him) more than actively being mean and she came through on her own & apologized. Like, it was just like Hunk said: She just needed processing time, something she’s been afforded preciously little of at any point ever, I mean she goes straight from realizing everyone she ever knew (except Coran) is dead to launching an offensive.

Bonus: I shall attempt to MBTI the bunch

(In Order of certainty)

Hunk - most obvious ISFJ to ever SiFe

Allura - ESTJ

Pidge - INTP

Keith - ISTP or possibly ISFP, certainly Se-aux tho. One the one hand he uses Fi-ish language in places (”If I don’t do this, I’ll never find out who I am...”) on the other hand he tends to prioritize the mission & is the most cynical/pragmatic of the bunch & tends to be stoic & objective unless provoked (”The rest of the universe has families too.” “Yeah but can we afford to rescue the princess?”) - His relative reactiveness when provoked is sufficiently accounted for by Se.

Zarkon - ESTJ

Shiro - ISTJ (though his instant commanding presence makes me doubt the I somewhat that said politician/leader ISTJs do happen. He seems to have been serious & dilligent even before all the trauma tho.)

Lance - ESFJ or possibly Se-dom, ESxx for sure tho.

Coran - Clearly has Si and Ne but not sure in which order. If I had to guess I’d say he’s either a very dutiful ENFP or a very quirky ISTJ.

#voltron legendary defender #Voltron

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andrewplaysmusic · 7 years

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Causing a Rackett, part 1

Starting this past semester I have been researching a short-lived musical instrument called the rackett. My goal is to recreate a consort of racketts, as well as explore organology through 3D-printing.

About the rackett

The rackett is a double-reeded instrument (much like the bassoon) that existed from the late-Renaissance through the early-Baroque periods. Although the country of origin is unknown, racketts are likely German or Italian creations; the name stems from the German work for “crooked:” rankett. The instrument’s convoluted design and quiet projection mostly likely resulted in its demise, lasting less than 50 years on the timeline. But history has not forgotten them.

➜ Listen to David Munrow and members of the Early Music Consort perform on Renaissance racketts (Youtube)

The design

There are two types of rackett designs, the Renaissance and the Baroque. They differ in two ways. The Renaissance rackett is cylindrical bore, and uses a reed placed at the top with a pirouette. The Baroque design on the other hand is a composite conical bore (a series of ever growing, but not tapered cylindrical bores) and employs a bocal much like a bassoon’s. I will be focusing on the Renaissance design in my research.

The rackett’s design is ingenious in a way; nine parallel bores are drilled into a cylinder and connected from alternatively top and bottom by carving through the end walls and sealing with cork plugs (Fig. 1). A double reed connects to the thin bores that run up and down the instrument, resulting in a deceivingly long instrument, and producing a low buzz. The discant rackett, smallest in the rackett family, is a 12 cm tall cylinder with a diameter of 4.8 cm. The small instrument packs over a meter of tubing (Fig. 2).

Fig. 1- A cutaway view of the bore system. The center bore goes down an connects to the bore on the right

Fig. 2- A sketch based on the Kunsthistoriche Museum’s discant rackett design

A pirouette is attached to the top of the instrument, from which half the reed protrudes (Fig. 4). The pirouette, in addition to being a very decorative part of the instrument, has a curious practical function. The rackett, being a low instrument, requires a very loose embouchure (lip pressure) in order to achieve low notes; too tight, and the instrument cannot reach the low notes. The problem with a loose embouchure on a free standing reed is that the player end up not having enough hold on the reed to keep it from sliding positions in the mouth. Thus a pirouette acts as a guard of sorts that the player’s mouth position can hold firm while maintaining a loose embouchure.

Fig. 3- A cutaway view of the pirouette and the reed within (the staple is also shown; the component that connects the reed and pirouette to the main body)

Racketts were made of boxwood or ivory; the only surviving originals (in Leipzig and Vienna) are made of the more durable ivory. The issue with racketts constructed from wood was the issue of moisture. The compact design of the instrument made it hard to wick out moisture. Consequently, cracks, rotting and even explosions were noted in the history books.

The sound

Because of the long tubing, the rackett family is a bass-y set of instruments. The discant rackett has a range of about G2 to D4. The tenor-alt, bass, and gross-bass (great bass) go even further down the bass range. Due to the small bore size however, (the discant’s bores are a mere 6mm in diameter) the instrument is considerable quieter than other reeded wind instruments (much like how the larger the bore of a tuba, the larger the sound, the small the bore, the quieter the sound). They emit a low buzzing timbre, much like the combination of a bassoon and a kazoo. Their unique timbre allows them to cut through large chamber ensembles.

➜ Compare the range and sound of a baroque contrabassoon and the great-bass rackett (Facebook, Unholy Rackett)

3D modeling

Following in the footsteps of Ricardo Simian and Jamie Savan and their work in 3D printing the Renaissance cornett, I decided to step up the game with a more complex instrument. I have been modeling using Autodesk Fusion 360 (See Fig. 4).

I have spent the last six days creating a digital replication of a Renaissance tenor-alt rackett based on published blueprints from the Toronto Consort Workshop publication of rackett-building instructions. Their design is modeled on the Leipzig original.

The first five days were spent creating the main model which consists of the body (main body, plugs, and end caps), the staple, the pirouette, and the reed (similar to a bassoon reed). The sixth day was spent redesigning the rackett for 3D printing.

Fig. 4- A wire-frame version of the rackett model in the Fusion 360 view-port

Preparing the 3D model for printing required changes to the design (I should note that all the parts, except the reed, will be 3D printed). As I will be using a Formlabs Form 1 SLA printer, I needed to adapt the model according to its restraints.

The Form 1 cannot print larger than a 125x125x165 mm object. Although the pirouette, staple, and reed are all separate from the body, and all much smaller than the maximum print size, the body itself is 200 mm long. To fix this, I basically chopped the rackett in two, combined the plugs and end caps with the body, and created a male-female design to minimize air leakage, especially from bore to another (Fig. 5). The advantage of this design, as far as I can tell, is that it will be easier for condensation to drip out of the instrument after use.

Fig. 5- A render of the components ready to be printed (plus the reed). Note that the top half of the body is upside-down to show the connection design. Starting from the left, counter clockwise: pirouette, top body, bottom body, staple, reed.

Hopefully, early into fall semester I can print this one out and give it a try! I’d like to print this in clear resin (Fig. 6); it’d either be really cool, or mildly cool and then eventually disgusting to look at.

Fig. 6- Render using transparent (in this case, polycarbonate) materials.

This is merely the beginning of this project, however. I intend to continue to work on it through the entire 2017-2018 academic year, culminating in a research paper, lecture/presentation/demonstration, and a consort concert.

Until part 2 (which will probably come much later),

Thanks to: My project adviser Dr. Sarah Waltz, outgoing Powell Scholars Director Dr. Cynthia Wagner-Weick, the Powell Scholars Program, and the University of the Pacific. Also thanks to Gregor for introducing me to this monstrosity of an instrument.

Additional resources

Kite-Powell, Jeffery T. “Racket.” A Performer’s Guide to Renaissance Music. New York: Schirmer, 1994. 76-78. Print. A short but detailed profile of the rackett, as well as some pointers on playing the instrument.

Robinson, Trevor. “Racketts.” The Amateur Wind Instrument Maker. Amherst: U of Massachusetts, 1973. 71-75. Print. Robinson provides some basic information about the rackett, as well as a modified (in some ways simplified) rackett design accessible to hobbyists. The book includes blueprints and finger-hole measurements. Additionally, the rest of the book is an intriguing resource, covering several other instruments as well.

#music #renaissance #instrument #3d modeling #3d printing #engineering #technology #university of the pacific #history #music history #formlabs #autodesk #classical music #conservatory #research #academia #university

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inkshares · 7 years

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A Q&A with cover designer M. S. Corley

Last July we brought book production in house. As part of that, we knew that we needed to hire and work with the best editors and designers around. Over the next few months we’ll be introducing you to some of these amazing people. We want to kick that set of introductions off today with Mike S. Corley.

Mike is known for his powerful, evocative covers. He’s done work for bestselling authors like Hugh Howey and Paolo Bacigalupi, and he’s worked on everything from novels to comic books to concept art for videogames. He’s designed covers for some of the biggest publishers, like Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin, and Random House.

Currently, he’s designing Matt Harry’s Sorcery for Beginners (publishing this October from Inkshares with the official cover reveal on Wednesday). He’s also the mastermind behind the gorgeous covers for other Inkshares titles like A God in the Shed and Rune of the Apprentice.

Mike recently spoke with us about reinventing Harry Potter covers, the pleasures of reading Murakami in the summertime, and his thoughts on what makes a great book cover.

Mike, we’ve heard you have a really interesting story about how you broke into the business. Can you tell the Inkshares community a bit about it?

Back in 2008, I was working at a merchandising agency and wasn’t really enjoying the work I was doing. It was easy and comfortable but not very fulfilling. So one night after work when I would normally work on my own personal projects, I was thinking about what I would do if I could have any art job. I’ve always been a bibliophile, so I figured if I could do anything, it would be designing book covers.

There was a trend at the time of redesigning things in old-fashioned, minimalist art styles. People were doing movies as books and videogames as books and posting them on the internet. So I thought, well I don’t wanna just copy them and try to make more movies or video game covers: why not just do books as books, go back and apply the same design aesthetic?

The first ones I tried my hand at were the Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. I worked it out in the old Penguin Marber Grid style of covers they had in the 60s.

I worked on Harry Potter next and started posting the covers online. I struck a chord with a lot of folks on the internet when I put my HP covers up and things escalated quickly with those covers specifically. I was going to make prints because there was a huge demand at the time, but then Warner Bros. lawyers came flying outta nowhere and shut me down quick. It was surreal that I would be contacted by a HP lawyer saying, “you can’t make this art and sell it” as they slowly cracked their knuckles into the phone quite menacingly. So of course I stopped any progress on producing those covers. Luckily they were already out in the wild and about a week later I got my first cover job from someone who saw them and wanted me to do something similar for them.

From then on I got about one book cover request a month for the rest of the year and it slowly increased. I would do my normal job during the day and work on covers at night when the jobs came in. In 2009 I quit my corporate job and went full time on covers because the timing seemed to be right, and I was young and stupid enough to take the risk without much damage to my current life. I figured I’d give it a go for a couple of months and if it didn’t work I could always go back to a design firm and get a “grown up” job again. Luckily that never happened.

Wow, that’s a hell of a story. You should publish that as a book on Inkshares, and we’ll make the cover. Kidding. What were your favorite books of 2016? And which books are currently on your nightstand?

I read a lot less last year than I would have liked, but a few standouts for me were:

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami. I have a tradition to read a couple of his books every summer during the months of May-August.This year my Murakami summer read will be 1Q84. He is the best. Makes me feel super melancholy and nostalgic for things I don’t even know.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I love the Frankenstein monster and the old Universal monster movies in particular, but I’ve never read the original novel, so I made that a goal for last year. I read an oversized version illustrated by Bernie Wrightson which really added to the story.

The Valancourt Book of Christmas Ghost Stories from Valancourt Books. I love reading ghost-story collections around Christmas time. There is something fantastic about sitting by the fire, drinking some Winter Cheer (look it up) on a cold winter night. I’ve read so many collections it seems that everyone just repeats the same ‘greatest hits’ in the ghost-story genre, but this book was all new to me.

On my nightstand I currently have The Vile Village, Book 7 in the Series of Unfortunate Events. I started re-reading them in January because of the new Netflix show coming out. I wanted a refresher, and they still are fantastic. I also just started The Pilgrim's Progress. I’ve read abridged versions before, but this is the first time I’ll read the original text which I’m looking forward to.

What was your favorite cover of last year? No choosing your own covers!

Hah, I wouldn’t choose my own covers. I’m one of those artists that never enjoys looking at work after it’s done, I’ve seen how the sausage got made so I’ve no interest in ogling at it beyond the creation itself.

I don’t know the designer off hand but one cover I really enjoyed was I Am for You by Mieko Ouchi. Beautiful and simple. I love images that are one thing at quick glance and then on closer inspection they reveal another.

Another would be Onibi, a French graphic novel by Atelier Sento. I really love the art style and the book, which I own but can’t read because I don’t know French beyond fries.

If you could live a day in the life of a character from any book who would it be?

Thomas Carnacki from William Hope Hodgson’s short stories on the character. He is the epitome of what I would like to do as a life job (besides art) and just has the perfect amount of confidence and scaredy-pants-ness as a guy I can relate the most to, who can still be cool.

What is your favorite part of the job? What’s the hardest?

Getting paid! Har har. No my favorite part is doing the concepts. I read pitches then I go through a little routine of prepping for a new book. I’ll gather some reference images that feel like a style I think matches the book, and I go for a run or have a long shower (that’s where my ideas come to me for whatever reason). Then I sit down for a day or a few and just work out every angle I can take the book with a number of concepts until I either think I hit the right one, run out of ideas, or run out of time. Sometimes I get art blocks during the concept phase and mope to my wife about how I’m a terrible designer and maybe I used up all my ideas on the last book. Then I’ll start the process over, run more, shower more, a literal rinse and repeat.

You forgot the “lather” part! What was the most challenging book you’ve ever worked on? What made it challenging?

There was this one indie-author book that I got a few years into doing freelance. They found me because of the Harry Potter covers. They detailed the book idea they had, even had a rough sketch and said “just make this in your style,” so I made just that in my style. They said “this is good, but was it too good?” They asked if I could make it look worse, of course not that specifically but very nearly. I went through round after round breaking it down till it was literally (not figuratively) their sketch in the end, and then they weren’t happy and said “okay how about you do it the way you’d like it.” And then I put my hands up in the air and said I’m probably not the right guy for the job. That was a playful retelling and this was drawn out over many months. It was very surreal, sad, and frustrating. It’s over though, so I can look back and laugh a bit about it.

*cries softly*

It felt a bit like McSweeney’s “Client Feedback on the Creation of the Earth.”

In your opinion, what makes a great book cover? Are there rules that for you across genre?

I don’t think that can be pinned down in words exactly. It’s very easy to see a terrible book cover and point out why it’s bad. Wrong font, bad images, weird layout, etc. But often a good cover, for me at least, is more of just a gut feeling. You know it when you see it, and you can try to break down why this part works or that part works but sometimes it doesn’t make sense at all. Sometimes rules are broken that shouldn’t be broken in design and it just works. Sometimes it’s how the title plays with the images. Sometimes it’s just the colors, or just the images. Sometimes it’s just great because art is relative and you think it’s a great cover when it actually isn’t...

I see a lot of publishers point to other comp covers out there and say “That cover is great, make that cover, but not..” and I can do the exact same thing that we see on the referenced cover but it won’t work for this other book for various reasons. Sometimes things just work with one book and don’t with another.

So for me, I have a certain taste in covers, and I realize my likes on art in general don’t match everyone’s tastes, but if I can be paired up with people where we mesh, then we are able to create great things. Or maybe they’re not! Depends on who’s looking at it.

Unless it’s our mothers looking at it, then of course it’s great.

You’ve had a lot of success, but you’re still young. Who are your favorite covers designers from the older generation?

Oh gosh, I don’t even have an answer there. The older generation? I may only be in my 30s, but I feel like the old generation already. Often times, and criminally, I don’t know who most cover designers are. It isn’t prominently posted anywhere especially with books from the olden days. There are lots of vintage books I own with just beautiful hardcover designs and I haven’t a clue who created them. Things are changing a bit now which is good, with social media artists are posting their own covers and often even publishers will link to the artist so it’s becoming a lot more known who did what. But I don’t have any good names to give. Saul Bass?

What was your favorite cover as a child?

Calvin and Hobbes collection covers. Those were the best.

If you could go back in time and design any book’s cover, what would it be and what would it look like?

I would love love love to go back and design the Harry P—just kidding. I would actually love to have been able to design the Lemony Snicket series. I’m not sure I could have done better than the original covers— Brett Helquist’s art is Lemony in my mind. But that series means so much to me and changed my view on books as a whole in a lot of ways, so getting to design them if only to take part in that series in a more concrete form than just being a fan would have really buttered my bread.

#cover design #cover designer #book covers #books #book #lit #harry potter #Lemony Snicket #A Series of Unfortunate Events #j.k. rowling #interview #reading #art #design #cover designing #Mike S. Corley #M.S. Corley

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cesarhcastrojr · 7 years

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In 1998, Jeff Bezos had a vision for the Internet. At that time he was four years into building Amazon. It was taking off as a humongous online emporium of books and music. In an interview with the Washington Post that year, Bezos made a visionary statement about the web. “If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores,” he said.

Fast-forward 19 years and here we are in 2017. My Amazon homepage is extremely personalized to me. (In August it was showing me glow sticks and solar-powered lamps. It clearly knew I was going to Burning Man.)

Bezos’ vision is reality for Amazon.com and many more e-commerce sites. At this point, personalized product recommendations are table stakes for online retail. But we haven’t seen personalization become as popular across the rest of the non-retail web. Most businesses have one version of the homepage that is supposed to cater to all different sorts of people. The sites still say, “come one, come all!”

This is troubling. Marketers spend so much time and energy developing personas and messaging for the myriad audiences we want to turn into customers. But it usually stops there. It’s time we start extending this persona-driven, personalized marketing to our websites, and specifically the homepage. The homepage is the proverbial front door of our brands; often a landing page, it’s the first page you’ll go to find out who a company is and what it does.

As marketers, it’s our job to crack open the black box on how to do things that may seem like a mystery. SEO? Moz takes care of that one. Website personalization is another one of those mysteries. What are the problems you need to work through to get it done? How much does it cost? How valuable is it?

I want to help bust open that black box by sharing first-hand experience personalizing Optimizely.com. In my time on the marketing team there, we redesigned the homepage. We went from one average best homepage to 26 different versions of the homepage uniquely personalized to different visitors. Let’s talk about why we did it, what we did, and how it all performed (because of course we measured it).

The average best version of our homepage.

Homepage personalized for visitors from Target.

Homepage personalized for visitors from the travel industry.

Homepage personalized for visitors browsing optimizely.com late night.

Homepage personalized for visitors from Microsoft.

Why invest in website personalization?

We redesigned and personalized the homepage for three reasons:

To get closer to a global maximum. We had reached a local maximum on our current site. After four years of iteration and conversion optimization, we had achieved the best possible version of the existing design. New A/B tests on the page returned insignificant results. We had to design a radically different site to get closer to the global maximum with higher conversion rates and engagement. In other words, we were climbing a mountain and had reached a small hill, but our goal was to summit the peak.

To increase lead quality. Our existing homepage was filling the sales funnel with lots of not-so-great leads. Often, people wound up in a conversation with a sales-human who were not sufficiently educated about what Optimizely had to offer. Not a good situation for the lead or the sales-human. We had to redesign the experience so that folks understood our value.

To support account-based marketing (ABM). ABM is an approach to marketing and selling that deliberately aligns sales and marketing around a list of important accounts and delivers targeted campaigns to engage those accounts. The goal is to be highly intentional with who you sell to and nurturing those interactions with personalized content. This personalization campaign was intended to drive engagement with our target accounts.

What to personalize and for whom?

After knowing why we were personalizing, the next question becomes what are we personalizing and for whom? The “for whom” part of this question was our starting place. It’s the best starting point for any personalization campaign. You must define your audience (aka who you’re personalizing for) before you decide on the experience (aka what you’re going to show them).

Defining your audiences takes time and is a worthy investment because it’s the foundation of the campaign. We came up with a few traits for what makes a “good” audience:

It should be identifiable. You should have a way to technically identify the thing that makes a visitor part of a specific audience.

It should be valuable. Measured either in volume or strategic importance, the audiences should be worth something. Because of our account based marketing approach, some of our audiences consist of one company, but that company has humongous value to us.

It should be differentiated enough to receive unique experiences. Your audiences should be distinguished enough to receive a unique experience.

With those traits in mind, you can define audiences across two axes: behavioral/what a visitor does and demographic/who a visitor is.

For our homepage campaign we chose to create unique experiences for these audiences:

Named accounts: Current and prospective customers that are part of a target account list. We defined this by uploading a list into Optimizely and using Demandbase to identify the IP address of visitors coming from those companies.

Industries: Visitors from target verticals which have strong use cases for A/B testing and personalization. We used Demandbase data for this as well, and CRM data.

Geography: Is the visitor from North America or Europe or APAC and so on. For geography we used Optimizely targeting abilities.

Customers: Visitors who are known Optimizely customers. We defined customers by identifying visitors who had an Optimizely login cookie on their browser.

A wireframe drawing of the new site with ample space for personalized content.

Engaged visitors: Return visitors who have engaged with one or more of Optimizely’s digital properties in the past (blog, website, community, knowledge base, etc.). We executed this with behavioral targeting through Optimizely.

Once you have audiences defined — and don’t be surprised if this takes a while — you are ready to dissect your page and identify the places you want to personalize.

Sidenote: We had to redesign the homepage in order to make space for content that could be personalized. Take a look at the original site; you can see that there’s hardly anything on the page, no content to personalize! In order to do website personalization, you need ample real estate to create personalized experiences.

How did personalization perform?

This personalization campaign was, importantly, an A/B test: 50% of homepage visitors saw the old version, and 50% saw a personalized one. Personalization is a hypothesis like any other design/functionality change and should be treated with similar rigor as A/B testing. You want to know that the personalization is improving the experience/conversion rate/metrics, not decreasing them.

Here’s the A and B:

In the test we measured lead conversion rate, accounts created, lead qualification rate, and softer anecdotal data like how it helped our sales team in conversations and how our customers reacted to it.

#PracticeWhatYouPreach #Personalization @Optimizely is pretty cool; Went there at 430 AM & greeted w/ "Still Awake?" http://pic.twitter.com/iuSs0DVPU9 — Vic Maine (@Vic_Maine) June 6, 2016

Well done @Optimizely! Super personal home page! Haven’t visited site on this computer before and yet they know me! http://pic.twitter.com/ElXJ5H8nC6 — Sean Kennedy (@Sean_Kennedy) April 14, 2016

Let’s start with the qualitative data. In short, people loved the new homepage. They even tweeted about it and sent emails to our team. If your homepage design is worth tweeting about, that’s either a fantastic or a horrible sign. We were glad that it was all positive sentiment.

Quantitatively, the new individualized homepage experience performed better than the original.

Overall, we saw a:

1.5% increase in engagement

113% increase in conversions to Solutions page

117% increase in conversions on “Test it Out” CTA to start account creation process

The personalized site did not affect lead conversion rate immediately. Like most online businesses, Optimizely is constantly striving to improve conversion rate (for the right leads, of course). While this new personalized homepage experience is not immediately improving lead quality, the team were confident enough in the results — and in the future optimization opportunity — to move 100% of traffic to the new homepage experiences.

What’s next?

Optimizely successfully killed THE homepage, or rather the single version of the homepage for everyone. They now have a new baseline of personalized homepages to optimize from. Like it goes with A/B testing, one test just leads to another; we always learn something, whether the test wins, loses, or is inconclusive.

The homepage was the tip of the iceberg with personalization. Since launching the homepage, Optimizely has used personalization to add content recommendations on the blog, to run a highly targeted Apple Watch campaign to target accounts (an effective ABM campaign), and to surface relevant product information to potential customers.

The web Jeff Bezos imagined in 1998 has become reality and the opportunities to use personalization to design better web experiences just continue to grow.

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my-tranhung · 7 years

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Posted by cara.harshman