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mysticalmusicwhispers · 4 years

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APH College AU Headcanons: Sweden

Dw, I’ll finish the Asians before moving on to the Nordics, I just had an urge to write Swe first. Explanation post here, AU tag is #college au musings on my blog!

- Architecture and design major

- As a hobby, he makes decorative and functional wood and clay figurines and furniture designs in the Scandinavian minimalism style.

- He usually makes smol animal figurines like this because they are smooth and curved with no sharp lines, friendly looking, and add nice, subtle touches to interior spaces. (But mostly, I just really like this headcanon because of the juxtaposition between a tall, intimidating looking guy working very diligently and quietly on small arts and crafts that could even be considered cute. It’s a nice image, and I think it’s fitting for Sweden’s character.)

- Decided to open an Etsy for his crafts and stuff (might as well try to support himself with his hobby). For each piece, there’s usually only one in stock because he makes everything by hand, so there aren’t any duplicates and every item he sells is slightly different. His shop is actually a lot more popular than his freelance work (see next hc); he thinks it’s sadly ironic his hobby is more useful than what he actually plans to do for a living :’) but he usually just takes it in stride and often reminds himself that he’s lucky to even have a hobby he can support himself with, and he doesn’t mind pivoting and making a living out of his Etsy.

- Trying to work freelance as a logo/graphic designer (he is an architecture student, but I don’t think many people would hire a college kid to design their buildings yet…). He’s still building up his portfolio, so he doesn’t have many customers yet.

- Lowkey dream job is to be an IKEA designer. Before you laugh, there are only 20 designers who make ALL the products they put out each year, so I’m gonna assume it’s incredibly hard to get a spot in the club.

- Really good at focusing, even though he lives in an apartment with the other Nordics who are very cHaoTiC

- Does fika almost religiously (it’s a Swedish coffee break where you relax and talk with the people around you, catch up and stuff). He never forgets it, and usually asks or forces the other Nordics to join him. It might be because of having this daily habit, but he never gets highkey stressed.

- B+ to A+ range grades. He really picked a good major, because he has an eye for design and a knack for building things, which makes homework and projects come fairly easy. Not a big fan of essays and typing, so he usually uses the dictation tool/voice input even if it sounds like he’s talking to himself (Denmark teases him about this a lot). His English and science skills are competent, but not stellar (and he’s not really interested in those subjects either), and he’s better at history and math.

- Always finishes his assignments in a timely manner; if he’s cramming or staying up late, he’ll only need an extra hour or two to wrap up and then he’ll go to bed around 11:30-12:45

- Very healthy lifestyle. Doesn’t eat much fast food or ramen or snacks instead of actual meals, exercises moderately, usually gets enough sleep. Has his life /mostly/ together so far.

- He used to go to the school cafe for breakfast but now just makes a half sandwich from scratch: one piece of toast with vegetables and some cheese on top. For lunch he always goes to the same food place and orders the same thing every time: chicken salad without mayonnaise and a yogurt (ok I have very little knowledge of food so please suggest alternatives that are more in character)

- Eats wheat crackers as a snack (would eat Swedish crispbread instead if he could buy it)

- Knows all the tricks when using rendering and editing software, ex Blender or photoshop. Very skilled at working on the computer for digital assignments.

- He prefers to take notes by hand, and always has a couple smaller sketchbook/graph paper notebooks on him (for design ideas and structure studies) as well as a lined paper one for notes. His handwriting is rather thin and narrow but very neat (like this). Has sworn off using pen.

- He renovated the Nordics’ whole shared apartment almost right after he moved into it (at the time it was just him and Denmark in there). Remade it into a perfect example of Scandinavian minimalism, and it’s very pleasant even if the rest of the apartment building is kinda dingy However, all the Nordics have personally redecorated their bedrooms to fit their own aesthetic and Sweden has a bit of a seizure when he goes into Finland’s room and sees death metal/rock aesthetic everywhere

- Doesn’t speak often in class, but when he does, it’s a thoughtful, intriguing comment or a well planned burn

- Has a fairly good relationship with his professors; they like his work ethic, designs, and how he’s pretty mature (some of them also like his lowkey sass). He likes them as well because they aren’t very scared by his resting bitch face, and as a result he talks to them a lot and has gotten to know them well. He’s been highly recommended for internships by some of them

- He and Norway have roasting sessions as they look on at people (Denmark) doing stupid things (often while drunk)

- This has no canon context but I really want Sweden and Netherlands to be friends in this AU, so they are. They met through Denmark, and the three go biking together sometimes. Sweden is more uptight about stuff, being healthy and not being obscene in public and nOt SmOKinG NeD pls save your lungs, Ned does not care and goes right on smoking. But like, they both admire things about each other; Berwald likes Ned’s efficiency with money and how he can get along with many people (at least on a business level) and Ned is impressed with Berwald’s prowess in design. Also they are both tall and sorta intimidating and that is a good enough similarity for a foundation of friendship

- He hasn’t joined a club, but has been called by the art people, some theater people, and some other miscellaneous clubs to build props and things for them. He’s chill about it, and likes taking the odd jobs around campus (obviously he doesn’t get paid but whatever)

- Has a reputation for being intimidating and scary because he doesn’t talk much and his face definitely isn’t an open book for his feelings, but if people actually talk to him without being scared they quickly find out he can be very playful, or at least is gentle and very nice

- But he doesn’t spill all his secrets to friends obviously; he just gets more talkative and more willing to share about things he likes and is passionate about

- I mentioned before that he’s not highkey stressed much, but he does feel like his future is futile (alliteration!) sometimes and sometimes just gets tired of doing work and needs a hug

- Also, you can’t really tell if he’s angry, but his expression gets stonier and he gets more threatening. Usually happens when someone insults one of his brothers or when he sees something unfair happening

I have some more but I forgot my basic structure for these headcanon posts so take this. Taiwan is next! Thank you for reading, and feedback is welcome and appreciated!

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mysticsparklewings · 4 years

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Fire Flower

Note: I originally made this painting and typed most of the description towards the end of March. I meant to upload this sooner, but things happened it obviously got pushed way back. Oh gee, would you look at that. It has somehow been 8-9 months since I last made a full acrylic painting... But! I have a video for this one to make up for it! Link: youtu.be/8IgVvgTiZjM I promise I've been trying (and failing) to come up with ideas to do more with this medium. Acrylic paint just isn't my thing. I swear I said this somewhere before, but I have no idea where; It's just hard for me to commit to an acrylic painting when I know I can get the look I want usually much faster and much more easily with other supplies. Acrylic painting just takes so much more time, set up, and patience. This very painting I know I probably could've had done in half the time using primarily watercolor instead, for example. So why is this an acrylic painting instead of something quicker and easier? Because my dear Sparklers, I made this painting and filmed it as a bit of a blending demo for a friend. They tried their hand at an acrylic painting with a sky going from red to yellow...except they lost most of the yellow in the process, and even they weren't really sure how it happened. So since I'm in sort of an art teaching/mentoring position to them, I decided I'd pull out my paints and take a shot at a similar look. Now, to be fair, my end result is very different from their's intentionally. They painted a boat on the water during sunset, I wanted something different and more me, so after some browsing around on Pinterest, I settled on this flower silhouette. I made my own job harder because the reference image had a blue and orange background with lots of black, almost like a vignette, so once I got past the stage of putting the base background colors down, I had a lot more work cut out for myself in trying to replicate that. Speaking of which, you can see most of my process in the video, but a recap just in case: I started by picking out my paint colors, and to be fair I could've gotten away with less or slightly different colors, but I got extravagant and picked a total of nine colors from my Liquitex Basics set (also known as currently the only decent acrylic paints I have):

• Mars Black • Ivory Black • Titanium White • Cadmium Red Deep Hue • Cadmium Red Light Hue • Portrait Pink • Naples Yellow Hue • Cadmium Yellow Medium Hue • Primary Yellow Why the two blacks? Mars Black is a "denser" black so to speak, it's more opaque (less transparent/see-through). The Ivory Black is less opaque, and it's a bit warmer in color than the Mars black. I used the Mars black in areas where I wanted a total and complete black and the Ivory black where I wanted some of the colors from the background to leak through a bit. It's subtle, more of a "feeling" to the eye than something you can clearly see. Also, I used the Portrait Pink, which like the name implies is a very pink flesh tone, and the Naples Yellow Hue (think a shade similar to Yellow Ochre...or fancy Mustard if "yellow ochre" doesn't help you visualize) primarily for blending and not so much for the colors themselves. And the Cadmium Red Light Hue is much more of a reddish-orange in person than it is red, which is why I picked it. It's also pretty transparent (yellows and oranges often are in acrylic paints, especially more student grade ones like the Liquitex Basics) so it also got lost in the mix fairly easily and I had to build it up a lot. In the video, you can definitely see as I start that I do indeed do a lot of back and forth with the paints, blending and layering to my heart's content to try and get the right color balance while also getting a smooth transition. And this goes on for quite a while; the background was definitely the part that took the longest. Initially, I did sketch in a couple of lines as markers for roughly where I needed certain parts of the gradient to begin and end, and with the paints, I went in and got down the base of red and yellows so I could then start working on marrying the two together. And I have to admit, even I let my yellows get a bit lost/pushed down more so than I would've liked. It's a difficult balance to strike; red is already a strong color that easily overpowers yellow. It's even easier when the yellow and your transition colors are more transparent while the red is more opaque. And even more so when your painting has a vignette feel to it. But once I finally had something I was comfortable with and blocked in most of the black (which was a pain in the butt to blend out, by the way, as I'm sure is obvious by how much I go back and forth with it in the video, misusing a fluffy watercolor brush as a mop brush to blend), I then took my outline for the silhouette that I'd already prepared on another piece of paper and used a Faber Castell Gelato (first a gray, then later I'd use a black) on the back to be able to transfer it on the canvas by tracing it with a mechanical pencil with the point pushed in. Personally, I really do think the Gelatos are the best method I've tried for making faux-transfer paper. They're soft so they transfer the color without much fuss without making a powder smudge-y mess (like charcoal, chalk, or pastels might), and they're also water-soluble so they play nicely with the wetness of the acrylic paints, especially if you've thinned them with a bit of water. Then I got the lovely challenge of trying to paint and blend out a nice bright setting sun on top of the blackish mess I'd made. (It actually wasn't that bad; the Titanium White is pretty opaque so once it mixed with the yellow and I got a couple of layers on it really didn't have any problem covering the darkness that it had to.) After that, I transferred again some of my lines I'd covered up and then got to work on the black silhouette parts. I did have to alter the look slightly because I wasn't quite as careful with lining up the placement of my "transfer paper" that second time and also because the brush had different ideas about how much black should be in some places than I did, but it wasn't too much of a hassle. And then, of course, the real challenge of blending the black up to meet the silhouettes without completely covering up my sun or messing up my other blending. Although, this also wasn't as tricky as I had thought it would be. Ironically, I think by the time I got this far I was finally starting to get a handle on the acrylics after having been away from them for so long. Believe it or not, this tiny 4"x6" painting took well over two hours to complete. I had at least two hours of footage that I trimmed down and sped up like four times, and that doesn't include the dry time in between two background layers, the background and the sun, and then the sun and the silhouette. I'd say it was probably closer to 3 and 1/2 hours total, although technically longer because I kept getting interrupted by things and I had to figure out how to set up the camera and everything before I actually started painting. Once I was done with the painting, I also had to actually edit the thing together, which took many more hours than I bothered to document or care to admit. (P.S. Whoever decided all free video editors that don't come pre-installed on a computer either must have stupidly low export limits and/or super obnoxious watermarks, I hate you.) Yeah, there's a reason it's been almost a year since I last posted an actual video of me making art... It just takes so long to edit everything together and I also have to make an extra effort to get stuff set up before and after for filming...Like, maybe it would be different if I had the space and resources to have an area where I could just leave everything and have a camera set up that doesn't move, but right now when my space is limited and my phone is my camera it's just so much easier to...well, to not. At any rate, here's one. One acrylic painting, and one video. A two-for-one special! Sort of! And I think both turned out pretty okay in the end, at least for someone that 1. Doesn't acrylic paint and 2. Doesn't make videos regularly. I call that a win, wouldn't you? Although, I have a few canvases stockpiled. I really should work on trying to squeeze more acrylic paintings into my art regimen somewhere to use those up, if nothing else... ____ Artwork © me, MysticSparkleWings ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble | Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

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wackygoofball · 5 years

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Gwenspiration: The Wacky Version Vol. 3 - The Moodboards

So, here I go again parading myself and tooting like there is no tomorrow.

As people still brave enough to follow me on Tumblr will know, I do a lot of moodboards, or at least I call them such. Others call them collages or storyboards or pictures with random text. Either way, for me, moodboards became a neat tool to somehow capture story ideas not yet anywhere near a level that I could write fic about them - or serve as inspirations for fics I am actually writing.

And it gives me opportunity to hoard unhealthy amounts of Gwen and Nik pics, in the name of moodboards. And science. And stuff. Whoozah!

So yeah, in this post, I want to share some of my personal favorites. A lot of them actually, because I can’t decide, really.

I will start off with a group of moodboards which took inspiration from the Marvel universe, since the Marvel universe was my gateway into the more active parts of fandom.

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An all-time fave is the Iron Man AU... I mean, what not to love about a JB AU with Jaime as sassy Tony Stark and Brienne as the not-taking any shit from you army doctor, am I right? But yeah, seriously, Jaime *is* the Tony Stark of the GOT universe, and I can’t be convinced otherwise. And neither should be you.

Also, the Iron Man suits just totally fit the color scheme for both, which made creating the moodboards all the better for me. Jaime and Brienne were made for armor, now in medieval or modern times, let’s not kid ourselves.

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Another Marvel fave has got to be Captain Westeros. Because if there is a female GOT Version of Steve Rogers, it’s gotta be Brienne of fuckin’ Tarth. This one is really close to my heart because it gave me a lot of feels coming up with plot bunnies for it, and the tragedy of those two people missing each other in time over and over again, always trying to protect one another, only to end up on opposite sides because of the machinations of others... *sigh*

And I mean, one guy loses an arm. The other is blond and strong... I don’t make the rules but this delivers me enough material to re-imagine this as a JB AU... so yeah, I do kinda make the rules after all. Anyway.

Since I realized that this post’s gonna get even looooonger, I decided to make a cut here and put the rest below, so not to have you scrolling for five hours.

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Although it’s not the most popular moodboard amongst my followers (you brave people, I can’t parade you enough for staying through the madness lol), I really, really love that Fantastic Four moodboard and the concept behind it. And I just know a lot of effort went into making Valyrian Steel Brienne, which took all of my three computer editing skillz brain cells. But yeah, here again, I liked to play with the idea of them not admitting to their love until shit hits the fan and then they hide behind that because... drama, angst, feels, pining, yadda.

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And we go from Marvel to DC little quick. Because Brienne is, most certainly, a Wonder Woman. Nuf said.

Now, let’s move on to other big movie franchises that give me all the JB feels:

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Jurassic Park (aka Valyrian Park) evidently holds a special place in my heart because JB fighting dinosaur-dragon hybrids and kicking ass while being disbelieving about what was bred out in Valyria thanks to some certain someones to rescue Brienne’s adoptive daughter Arya is just... a thing? For me anyway.

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More down memory lane, I don’t know how often I watched the LOTR movies, suffice to say it was a lot a lot. We had the extended versions DVDs of the first two and basically it was the one thing to watch when nothing was on (which was the case a lot). Either way. JB in MIddle Earth long after the days of Frodo et al. - why? Because I just loved the idea (and aesthetic) of Jaime as a ranger and Brienne as a knight of Gondor working in disguise. And Hobbipod. I mean, Pod as a Hobbit. Come the fuck on. And Tyrion as an asshole wizard. What could possibly go wrong? This moodboard was very time-consuming as I had to do a lot of edits (pointy ears, tiny up people, smudge Brienne’s face on a lot of Boromir and Faramir images, smudge Jaime’s face on a lot of Aragorn images, you name it). So yeah. No matter its popularity... I dig it. Despite not having read the books yet (I know, shocking), I continue to ogle at the idea and go like: Must. Write. But. Must. Resist. Either way. Mood.

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So yeah, I grew up watching these movies a lot, too (I grew up watching a lot of TV, period). And when Gwen was cast as Captain Phasma, I got a lot of JB juices flowing as a result. Mehe. I found it was a fun idea to play with, to basically *kill* Phasma so *Brienne* can come into play and assume her identity. And a rundown Jedi!Jaime who’s lost faith in himself and everything else safe for his partner in crime/resistance is just... I needz. So you gotta cope with it. I still adore this concept a lot even if others may not. :)

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This one’s just... gah. Feels. And I really liked the color scheme lol. And I watched Horse Whisperer A LOT. Because of feels. And horses. And Honor is a horse and he deserved better than be barbecued at Highgarden, dammit.

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The No Reservations AU definitely has to be in this post because I live for this dynamic. Brienne taking care of the girls, not knowing how, though, constantly doubting herself while always trying to be perfect and composed, not just in life but on the job as well. And Jaime being the laid-back guy who’s just a darn good chef but may carry his own baggage of problems that keep him from his happy ending story is just... mah jam.

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This one was a lot of fun to do because you don’t really think about Erin Brockovich when you say Brienne of Tarth in terms of character. But when you scratch away the boob jokes and the differences in where they come from, what you find are two hard-working women who fight for justice, so I found that close enough. And it was excuse enough for me to go down the lane of biker!Jaime because... dayum.

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Music and Lyrics is an all-time guilty pleasure romcom of mine. It’s so light and easy and I kind of love how everyone is basically a bunch of awkward losers. All the more perfect for Jaime as a singer (we need that in our lives after the infamous video Nik was in to sing to us about global warming...) and Brienne as the unexpectedly gifted songwriter. What I like about the moodboard per se is how the color scheme turned out because it’s all warm and bright and... makes me happy.

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Very much in contrast to the former stands this one. I still love the overall mood of it and I dig the story idea because I dug both The Prestige and The Illustionist because they presented something dark yet very different, which made it all the more appealing to put into a moodboard for me. While not the most well-known moodboard of mine, I keep going back to it time and time again to basically lust at all the illusions and magic and drama. And blue butterflies.

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What is there not to love about a Pacific Rim AU for JB, am I right? Right?! JB ain’t just compatible when it comes to the Drift, yo, that’s all I’m gonna say. Reasons why I like the moodboard a lot is that it’s very different, flashy colors, gigantic robots, and I was mostly alright with how the edits turned out. It is tough to get images that fit the angles, yo.

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Jumping back in time once more, I really adore this one even though it’s not one of my popular moodboards. I dug the fusion of elements from Cinderella Man while granting Brienne as the female lead more space to develop as a character and make her a badass sniper nurse who is about to get her doctor’s degree. And Jaime doing anything to make it work because he owes her a debt (and his love) by boxing his way to their shared life is just... nice.

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Another supposedly lesser known moodboard is this one, though I really adore it for its premise and the amount of work I put into it (all the giffing and moodboarding). I also found use for that image of Gwen with what looks like the veil of a nun, which was probably what had me inspired in the first place lol. The plot bunnies revolve less around Se7en and more the novel El ùltimo Catón (2001) because it has a nun solving a mystery revolving around Dante’s works. But Se7en gives us the Seven, which is a delicious parallel too hard to ignore. For me at least. If only I knew how to write crime, dammit.

Now, to move more into the serial (smooth transition from serial killer to serial TV shows, I know, I know) way of life, here is some moodboards inspired by TV shows (although some have since gotten movies which I also took inspiration from... yadda):

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Childhood memory galore. I spent many weekends watching The A-Team with the whole family. When the movie came out, I was happy about the feels it gave me (and the “you spin my head right round” scene still cracks me up more often than it should). Either way. I found it absolutely necessary for Jaime to be Face, for Tyrion to be Hannibal, for Bronn to be B.A. and cuss at everyone and everything and Brienne giving us the strangest genderbend of a Howling Mad Murdock. It added some angst, which I always need because I am a thirsty hoe for it. In case no one noticed yet. Ha.

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This one is very remotely inspired by The Bletchley Circle and the Imitation Game (because both feature encryption and one features Charles Dance already, yo.) I just really dug the idea of Brienne being so good at this because she is such a straight thinker but being underestimated because “she a woman.” And of course her not being done just encoding messages but getting into action, very much to the dismay of the stupid soldier wanting to defend the bae from harm. What could possibly go wrong? Right. A lot.

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Then. Elementary. Let me count the ways in which I love that show... ALL THE WAYS. And I really dig it as a JB AU. I have so many thoughts and feelings, I can’t even begin to tell you. I especially had my fun basically making Jaime Sherlock without making him really Sherlock because that guy was the one who taught him how to be an investigator before disappearing and fucking up his life for bad. And Brienne as the army doctor turned sober companion turned private investigator turned love interest is just too delicious to ignore.

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Pants down I mean hands down, this may be the actual favorite (currently) amongst them all for the plain reason that I also grew up watching that series and still watch it and keep obsessing about it. Ever since Discovery launched and has since given me both joy and grief, I found myself intrigued by the premise of a JB Star Trek AU where Brienne would be standing *with* the Klingons during the war around the time Discovery takes place, and Captain Jaime Lannister having lost far too much to this war already to truly trust anyone, even less so a woman who ran to the Klingons, for what it seems.

You would not believe how many ideas I have for a fic based on it. You wouldn’t believe that I basically have a sequel to that fic already in mind. And you would definitely believe, knowing me, that I am nowhere near writing that fic. But a fangirl can dream and moodboard, right? The moodboard was such a fun way of going about it, not only for the edits but because I could sneak some secret Klingon messages in there. :)

Now, on to the last part, which are the moodboards not inspired by movies or TV shows primarily but really just spewed out of my wacky, wacky brain:

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This has a special place in my heart because it combines military and the traumas it comes with for JB and.... the aesthetic of farming. And both finding a kind of peace they didn’t know they were looking for as they struggle to adjust and find their way back “to normal” after the horrors they have both seen in war. And did I mention the aesthetic? And Jaime in plaid? All dirty and sweaty? Do I have to say more?

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Why this one? Because it combines angst and romance and falling in love twice because DESTINY. And paintings. I love me my artist AUs. So that was my go at it, combining it with the “mystery” to be uncovered about what history Jaime and Brienne actually share as he tries to put his memories back together. Also. This moodboard gave me opportunity to try out new filters and create JB paintings. :)

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This one’s gotta be on the list since I also added the Horse Whisperer. Now it’s Dog Whisperer Jaime and Brienne who won’t give up on her dog who’s seen some shit in the warzone (as did she, but Brienne will put it all aside for her doggish best buddy, of course). While it’s not a very popular moodboard of mine, I really enjoy the premise of it and how the dynamics can so easily change between the two of them if you see it in comparison to the Horse Whisperer AU. Also. I just really think Jaime is a total pet person.

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Another lesser known moodboard, I’d assume, but I really dug the premise of it (still do), and it was intriguing to do some edits to make Jaime’s hand *truly* golden lol. With people having developed strange mutations which aren’t nearly as much fun as they are in Fantastic Four AUs. What I liked about it was the idea that Brienne would have a kind of mutation/ability that links to the mind, since she is such a physically strong fighter that she may rather rely on that than on her own mind, fearing that she cannot control that with discipline the same way she can train her body with it. What unites the two is their strong wish to protect the people in their care, in a world on the verge of collapse forcing two unexpected allies together (okay, I totally expected it, but they didn’t). Either way. Much love for this one. :)

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Aaaand the last one (not of all the ones I made but the ones I picked for Gwenspiration). I really, really, really adore this one because I was so happy with how the aesthetic turned out and how the colors all match. And I dig the premise. Like holy moly do I dig it deep. Jaime and Brienne both serving in military, but on different fronts, and almost accidentally ending up writing each other letters? I mean... the PINING. And Brienne having to decipher Jaime’s chickenscratch. Yeah no, but for real. I just love the idea so much. That they are both committed to the cause while also yearning for a home, for peaceful times, for sweet, sweet love. And them meeting up and acting like stupid teenagers, only for drama to keep hitting because. It’s eh me angsty Wacky.

Either way. I dig the premises of a lot of my moodboards (in fact... basically all of them or else I wouldn’t be making them, I guess). I spared you listing all of them, though I listed a whole damn lot already. Moodboards are an awesome means for me personally to visualize and (re-)imagine. And since quite a few people seem to continue to be onboard with them, I am all the happier to keep making them.

That’s all for today.

Much love! ♥♥♥

*flies away*

#gwenspiration #jaime x brienne #jaime lannister #brienne of tarth #game of thrones #wacky tries moodboards #and talks about them a lot

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marveliciousfanace · 5 years

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Sorry to hear about the final. If you’re looking for prompts to write about, I like thinking that Crowley is super up-to-date with modern technology, lingo, and social media. Aziraphale is not. Crowley tries to get Azi to learn how to use Instagram, or something.

I’ll probably be taking prompts for the next few days, at least. Since I, like Aziraphale, am social-media inept, hopefully this was something along the lines of what you were looking for :)

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Aziraphale huffed and folded his arms, leaning back in the chair and frowning irritably at the screen. “I just don’t see the point.”

“The point, angel,” Crowley said, “is that it’s the twenty-first century. It will not kill you to use social media.” The demon was currently standing over Aziraphale, pressed against the angel’s back, an arm on either side of him as he clicked away at Aziraphale’s ancient computer. Well, ancient by Crowley’s standards: he’d gifted Aziraphale a new one about ten years ago, much less bulky than the original goliath he’d owned, and Aziraphale had not updated it since. Crowley only had an ultra slim ‘business’ laptop for the look of the thing, preferring to do everything through his smartphone, but he’d never managed to get Aziraphale beyond a flip phone so computer it was.

“It hardly seems necessary.”

Crowley clicked onto the next screen and glanced at the angel. “Relax,” he said. “Be glad I’m not trying to sign you up for Instagram or Twitter.” He gestured at the Facebook login screen with a flourish. “This is old people social media, angel. Perfect for you.”

“I resent that,” Aziraphale said, although with slightly less rancour. He peered at the screen with a little more interest. “So, I just…fill in these little boxes and the computer does the rest?”

“Yep.” Crowley paused. “You do have an email account, right?”

Aziraphale scoffed. “Of course. I use it to keep in touch with Miss Anathema. And with other specialists in my trade, of course.”

Crowley straightened up and grinned. “Well, think about how many more specialists you can keep in contact with by following them on social media.”

“Do you think?”

Crowley nodded sagely. “Oh, sure. Loads.”

Aziraphale began filling out the information, using the name and age currently on all his paperwork. Idly, he asked, “Do you have a Facebook, my dear?”

“I do.” He never used it, but he hadn’t wanted to delete the account in case the angel had ever come around. “We can be friends.”

“I rather hope we’re more than friends at this point,” Aziraphale pointed out.

Crowley rolled his eyes. “Facebook friends, angel. It’s how people follow each other.”

“I see.” Aziraphale hit the sign up button, and blinked when it brought him to the next page. “Crowley, it wants me to fill more things in.”

Crowley rested his chin on Aziraphale’s shoulder, draping himself over the angel. “That’s just extra stuff,” he said. “Gender, relationship status, profile photo, that sort of thing.”

Aziraphale frowned at the options. Tentatively, he selected male, and then turned to the relationship status. “Should I put ‘it’s complicated’?”

Crowley winced. “Please don’t.”

“Why not? Our relationship is complicated. It’s not accurate to simply say we are dating or married, and we certainly aren’t single.”

“Yeah, but…” Crowley nosed at the angel’s cheek. “’It’s complicated’ means you’re kind-of-sort-of not in a relationship at all, really.” He kissed the corner of Aziraphale’s lips. “And we most certainly are.”

“I see. What do you have on your Facebook, then?”

“I said we’re married.” He glanced worriedly at Aziraphale. “That’s alright, isn’t it?”

“Quite alright.” Aziraphale smiled and clicked the button. He filled out a few more bubbles, and then stopped on the profile photo and banner. “I don’t think I have any personal photographs. Should I just put something generic?”

“Nah, hang on.” Crowley fished his phone out of his pocket and hopped up on the desk, propping his feet on Aziraphale’s chair. He flicked through his album, and then sent two to an email account his own disused one barely remembered. “I’ve sent a couple pictures to your email. Let me know what you think.”

Aziraphale opened a new tab and drew up his email with surprising ease. Crowley was impressed. Apparently, it wasn’t the technology that Aziraphale struggled with, just the application. Aziraphale clicked onto the email and stared. He looked at the photos, then back at Crowley. “When did you…?”

Crowley grinned. “I take lots of photos of you, angel. That way I can look at you when you’re not around.”

The profile photo he’d selected was from a few months ago at St. James’s Park. The sun had hit Aziraphale’s hair just right, giving him a beautiful halo of light that Crowley had though too ironic (and stunning) not to capture. Aziraphale was grinning in the picture, his eyes shining. He had, if Crowley remembered correctly, been expounding on a rare new edition he’d just gotten in. He was gorgeous.Aziraphale looked at the other one. “This is you, isn’t it?” he said. As if he could ever confuse Crowley for any other snake.

“It’s the bookshop, too,” Crowley pointed out. In the picture, he was draped in serpentine form over a pile of prophecy books, some open to random pages. “So it works.”

“How did you manage to take it?”

“Carefully.” Thank someone for phone camera timers.

With a little assistance, Aziraphale managed to transfer the images from his email to his Facebook profile. He looked at Crowley. “Now what?”

Crowley opened his app. “Hang on. I’m sending you a friend request.” It popped up on the screen with a ping. “Now hit accept.”

Aziraphale did. “Is that all?”

“That’s pretty much it,” Crowley said. “You can make posts, if you like, or look for other people.”

“What would I post about?”

“I dunno,” Crowley shrugged. “Book covers? Old memes?”

“What’s a meme?”

“Never mind.”

Aziraphale clicked curiously onto Crowley’s account and shot him a sappy grin. “Oh, my darling. Your profile picture is both of us?”

“Yeah, well,” Crowley mumbled. “You didn’t have an account.”

“It’s sweet.”

“It’s not a big deal.” His banner was him sprawled across the hood of the Bentley. He’d figured at least one of the photos should have his husband in it.

He slid into Aziraphale’s lap and wrapped his arms around the angel’s shoulders. “There you go,” he said, grinning. “You’re on social media now. Even if it is just Facebook.”

“Are you pleased?”

“I am.”

“Good.” Aziraphale leaned in and kissed him.

Crowley would ignore most of Aziraphale’s Facebook posts after that; the angel still didn’t seem to have a grasp of what the point of Facebook was, and more often than not his posts were nonsense. But he also sometimes posted things like “My husband looks beautiful today” and “Sometimes I think I don’t have the capacity for any more love in my being. Then I look at him and realize love is infinite.” They were the sort of cheesy, corny things a middle-aged mother might post, but still. You had to smile. And Crowley did.

#good omens #ineffable husbands #my thoughts #my writing #thank you for the prompt

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zedecksiew · 5 years

Text

Silent Titans

So: “Silent Titans”, an RPG setting / adventure with text by Patrick Stuart and art by Dirk Detweiler Leichty.

Great art and writing in a very handsome volume. (To my hands, it feels better-made than the current-edition D&D tomes; publisher Jacob Hurst’s previous efforts were the Hot Springs Island books, similarly lavish.) Here it is on the leaf-strewn floor of my living room:

And since I have a terrible phone camera that refuses to focus, some screenshots from the “Silent Titans” PDF:

Virtually every review I’ve read of “Silent Titans” has been glowing. Here’s a fun one: a lit-crit deep reading of the text.

It’s up for a battery of 2019 ENnies -- Cartography, Writing, Production Values, Product of the Year. I guess this doubles as my ENnie endorsement post? You should vote for “Silent Titans”, when the time comes. (Or “Mothership”. Or “Troika!”. Or Luka Rejec’s “Ultraviolet Grasslands”. All of those are good.)

I’m a Patrick Stuart fan. “Silent Titans” doesn’t change this.

The book’s setting, Wir-Heal, is at once English-countryside pastoral and post-modern dreary, and hopelessly warped by the presence of the titular Titans -- “quasi-living multidimensional hyper-intelligences from an unimaginably distant future”.

Think future-Cthulhus, whose nightmare-dreamings are leaking into the reality of the land under which they lie.

And what nightmares these are! Take the Predator Lane: a living highway that chases player-characters like a “wolf tracking their scent”.

Or the Radio Noise Men: “patches of screeching radio noise in humanoid shape”.

Or Targeted Individuals: “silent, people-shaped, racing heat-images”, with crosshair-ed screens for faces. Their face-screens display their target -- you! -- from a top-down, spy-satellite perspective, and this zooms in as they run towards you. They blow up when they arrive.

The anthropomorphic representation of drone warfare, as an RPG monster. Holy shit, that’s crazy good.

Dirk’s art is a joy to stare at. His stuff is so unlike anything else in RPGs currently. I also love how obviously not-made-on-a-computer it is; such a pleasure, seeing the quality of lines made by a pen touching paper.

That he doesn’t get an ENnie nomination for “Silent Titan” ’s art feels like a snub.

If there’s one quibble I have with the book, it’s this: The art and the writing are maybe too appropriate for each other.

“Cracked concrete coast defences, iron exposed. Wrack-caked steps to crow-pecked sand”, mixed with “Fields of wrecked agricultural machines bordered by gates, hedge, barbed wire and cow traps”.

The writing is moody; the images surreal.

The art is mind-bendy in similar ways, as if reality’s perspective lines were dosed with psychedelics.

Which is brilliantly setting-appropriate. But there were times, in the reading (and in the playing; I’ve been in a “Silent Titans” campaign for some months, now), when it was hard to grok the imagery -- how a particular monster looks; what the landscape looks like; which other bit of text this bit of text is alluding to --

and I wished the art was ever so slightly more mundane, more anchored, so my literal brain could grasp things quicker.

But yeah: minor quibble.

The adventure + setting stuff feels refreshingly unfamiliar.

This would be a liability elsewhere, but “Silent Titans” understands the need to orientate GMs. Patrick spends some time discussing how to improv detail, atmosphere, and “wholeness”:

“The sense of wholeness I aim for is the same you might have walking through your hometown to the front door of your living space. You know vaguely and generally where everything is and what things would make sense to be where, but you are not obsessively considering every single small detail.”

There are also thorough takes on the principles that underlie interesting RPG encounters:

“Remember: in times of immediate danger, every spatial decision is also a moral decision.”

“If a creature has a deep, resonant poetic reason to be, for instance, “Dumb and Dangerous”, which is integrated into the world and makes sense, then so much the better. But the more important principle is that it have something interesting the PCs can DO with it.”

A good reminder! Especially for the more indulgent writers among us.

These notes alone are worth the price of admission, I think.

One of the book’s appendices is an interview with Chris McDowall, whose “Into The Odd” system “Silent Titans” uses.

It’s an insightful little chat:

PATRICK: Is “Into The Odd” a problem-solving game?

CHRIS: For me the dual cores of the game are Exploration and Problem Solving. If you do it really well then either of those can stand alone. I’ve had long chunks of sessions where there isn’t a huge amount of conflict, but the players are just enjoying “Bastion” and laughing at some ridiculous situation or character. Likewise, I’ve had sessions where the world became largely irrelevant in the face of pure dungeon problem solving, but the real magic is when you get them working together.

Both, but problem solving more clearly, are things that tabletop games still do better than videogames. No videogame offers the tactical infinity of a tabletop RPG, so whatever game I’m running I’m going to be looking at how best to focus in on that strength.

It’s one of those elements that often benefits from an absence of mechanics, rather than needing their support, so “Into The Odd” was definitely designed with that in mind.

And this bit about how “rules =/= the game”, in RPGs:

Also worth the price of admission!

My favourite thing about “Silent Titans”? It is a love letter to the place Patrick comes from:

“I created ‘Wir-Heal’ based almost entirely on the feel and impression of my home, the Wirral. Its lonely, post-industrial, ‘time-lost’ nature is my literalisation of the feel and mood of the place where I live.”

In his closing notes, Patrick explains that Hugh Lupus, a character in the book, is a real figure from the vicinity of the Wirral -- just as Legion’s Fort, the city he rules, is a phantasm of the actual city of Chester.

Ditto Mister Samuel Moreton, “who really did ride about in an omnibus with a bunch of cronies treating the Court like a street gang using legal powers it took an act of Parliament to remove. But who was not, literally, a Wolf.”

(And I know that the painted boats in Elles Mere is based on real-life painted boats Patrick encountered in some canal. I know this because I seem to remember him blogging about them? But I can’t for the life of me find that particular post.)

"Silent Titan” ’s specificity makes it a somewhat intimate work. It is a glimpse into the author’s own geography, a window into their lived reality. Patrick indulges his fascination with the Wirral peninsula; because of this, the Wirral is made fascinating to us, also.

This channeling of the personal and the specific should happen more often, in RPG works. Patrick seems to think so, too. Here he talks about the Wrecked Heptarchy, the blank setting that borders Wir-Heal:

“You almost certainly live somewhere too. Your own part of the Wrecked Heptarchy could be based on your impressions of your home. If you are the kind of imaginative introvert who usually buys this kind of thing its likely that you have already imagined your local streets as zones of adventure, that would be a good place to start.”

Get “Silent Titans” HERE.

#reviews #rpgs #patrick stuart #silent titans #dirk detweiler leichty #chris mcdowall #specificity #the wirral

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fishdavidson · 5 years

Photo

(BELATED!) Dream Journal 2019-07-10: Sort of Like Good Omens, But With Superheroes And Loud Farts

Good news, everyone! So far the new medication is not affecting dreams! However, I didn’t end up posting last night because I played Electronic Super Joy and AudioSurf 2 (purchased in the most recent Steam sale) until it was too late for me to write anything substantial before going to bed. But now that I have steeled my resolve to not play any more computer games until I have caught up on my writing, I’m finally getting around to posting some high-quality content.

This dream in particular was an almost perfectly coherent narrative without doing any editing, and it was a pretty cool story, too. And the best part is that it even had a semi-plausible and self-consistent mythology. So let’s get to narratin’!

It is mere days before the end of the world, but everyday life looks pretty similar to how it looks today. Except there were a handful of superheroes that the general public knew about who were trying to keep the world safe from various threats. These superheroes were more like Iron Man than Superman, in that they were regular mortal people that happened to own super-suits and fantastic technology.

An unnamed detective with an interest in historical archaeology is trying to solve a case where some expensive Vera Wang ceramics were stolen. She finds the plates in a disused janitor’s closet in an apartment building, and the only person who had access to that closet claims the plates were counterfeit items purchased at a dollar store. Either way, the plates got confiscated as evidence and the detective went home for the evening.

Later that night, the detective is contacted by a superhero who is basically Arthur from Amazon’s version of The Tick. Arthur has discovered something written in an ancient language that he believes may herald the impending end of the world. The detective translates it, and she confirms it has some bearing on an ancient prophecy about the battle for the end of the world.

It postulates that Adam and Eve were forbidden from ever entering the Garden of Eden again, but Adam will one day be reborn and use powerful magic to unmake the world as we know it and reshape it into a new Eden that Adam and Eve will live in to spite God. Yes, my asleep mind actually came up with this. But it gets even better!

Adam has come into our world already and reached adulthood. His mighty powers begin to manifest, but they are not quite as strong as God’s powers of creation. In order to achieve omniscience, Adam has only a scant handful of days to accomplish several large tasks:

Sing the Song of Creation, which had long since been lost to time

Find the Letters of Creation, which were a set of love letters written between Adam and Lilith.

Summon Eve into the world

Move all the land into one big supercontinent that shall become Eden.

You might think that it is nearly impossible to reconstruct a song that has been lost for thousands of years and was never written down, and you’d be right. Unfortunately, Adam realized that he can just pick a song and use his semi-divine powers to declare it to be the new Song of Creation. His choice is a little too on-the-nose, and he chooses “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King soundtrack.

This is where I, Fish Davidson, enter the picture. It’s also one of the few points in the dream that aren’t as narratively consistent. Somehow I have managed to acquire five of the twelve known Letters of Creation. Twelve letters? SUBCONSCIOUS SYMBOLISM, I SAY!

I meet up with Adam in the service corridor of a shopping mall. Adam wants to negotiate for possession of the letters. Why he doesn’t smite me on the spot at this moment is beyond me, but I have brought the letters in a ziploc bag and I am prepared to do stupid and reckless things to prevent the end of the world.

I have not come to negotiate. I am just here to stall for time.

Adam starts singing “The Circle of Life,” and it is filled with majesty and divine power. It is hard to resist singing along, so I do the only thing I can think of: yank the letters out of the bag and start literally eating them. Apparently reading the letters aloud was the key to bringing Even into this world, which would allow the newly-reunited power-couple to work even faster. But I put the kibosh on that plan by gnawing on that ancient parchment like a cow on grass-flavored methamphetamine. You can’t read the letters if they are impossibly shredded by the gnashing of teeth.

Meanwhile, Arthur has reverse-engineered something called the Engine of Creation with the help of the detective’s impressive knowledge of history. The Engine is an apocryphal golem that looks like a large clay urn with dog legs that God supposedly used to create land and vegetation in the beginning. It requires the power of a true god to work at full capacity, but Arthur is reasonably confident that it will still work (albeit less efficiently) with some big batteries and a bit of ingenuity.

Adam has already begun moving big chunks of land toward Africa. Most of South America is now underwater, traveling like a jet plane under the sea toward the western coast of Africa. By the end of the day, South America, Africa, and Australia will be one big continent.

Arthur has is charging every battery he can get his hands on, and has even sacrificed the nuclear reactor in his flying super-suit to power the Engine of Creation (codenamed Seedy) in an attempt to make more land for the displaced people of South America.

Seedy gets powered up and runs around like a playful puppy for a moment before it lowers itself to the ground and starts shaking. If God was there to give Seedy some extra power, it would be spraying industrial quantities of dirt and trees everywhere. But on battery power, all Seedy can manage to produce is a loud 10-second long fart and a single turnip.

In more traditional narratives, this would be the place where all hope seems lost. Adam has far more power by himself than we could ever muster on our own. But between Arthur activating Seedy and me eating the Letters of Creation, God got angry enough to come back Old-Testament style and smite Adam with an adequate amount of force to destroy him forever.

Humanity, you’re welcome.

----------------

Header image is Adam and Eve expelled from Eden by an angel. Etching by H. Winstanley after G. Reni, 1728.

#dream journal #dreams #fishdavidson #adam and eve #good omens #end of the world #plates #vera wang #the tick #arthur #detective #circle of life #lion king

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momestuck · 5 years

Text

Let’s read Hiveswap Friendsim... volume 18!

Imagine I edited the final shot of End of Evangelion here to put trolls on it. That’s more effort than I’m actually willing to put in. Imagining it is probably almost as good.

This chapter is fittingly called “Of Endings, Many”.

The opening narration is kind of pointed and sarcastic. It jokes about saying trite things like ‘the circle is complete’... and then goes elsewhere.

“You’ve got enough friends, now you need answers-” - and then it interrupts itself, realising it’s just the intro screen.

I wonder who writes the intro screens?

This time we have... another jadeblood, and also a final pair of purplebloods, the second troll pair.

Lanque

Lanque is written by the mysterious “V”, who previously managed to get us to lick a clown’s armpit and then wrote some interesting things about intertextuality. I have high hopes!

Content warning: Lanque’s story deals explicitly with sex with a man, in a situation of dubious consent on the player character’s part.

Lanque’s theme I’m sure I recognise from Homestuck proper, though I’d have to do some digging to see what it’s reprising. It’s called “yall know i just do the music right” - another James Roach piece.

It begins with us getting a call from Lynera. The narration somewhat uncharitably says “that nutty bitch is exactly the sort of destabilizing influence your life needs right now”. In a positive, not sarcastic way at least.

She wants to start making friends herself...

The narration is really in a hurry this time around. We reprise the party background from the last episode.

I appreciate the kind of breezy enthusiastic chaos in V’s writing.

We’re in a cape, bra and fishnets. A perfect outfit for the final chapter.

Wow the narration just isn’t giving a shit anymore. Final chapter striking hard.

We try to figure out whose hive we’re going to... and oh shit, it’s Ardata’s. First troll we ever met, as well. The party is described as a “frathouse rager” - which, Lynera acknowledges, is not her scene at all.

Is the narrator already drunk? Or is Ardata fucking with our head again?

Ardata declares that it’s a ‘kiiickback’ for all the ‘world’s fiiinest iiinfluencers’... and neither me nor Lynera is invited. Apparently she heard about it from someone called Lanque, who’s also not invited.

What is up with this narration? It’s coming across like a standup performance.

At that point, Ardata drops a... nsfw warning on us.

I didn’t actually realise this volume had an ‘accompanying mature content description’. I think what I’m gonna do is... obviously I’m gonna play the chapter, but I will put specific content warnings before sections of the post that have potentially triggering content, and if there are explicit images, I will pixellise out any explicit bits before I embed them in the post. spoiler alert: this ain’t exactly Ladykiller in a Bind there.

That’s a hell of a warning, huh. Especially given the previous armpit-licking chapter by ‘V’ was about at the absolute limit of sfw horny anyway. Fuck knows what they’re about to inflict on us now.

Also: James Roach’s track name is starting to make sense. Apparently he wants to distance himself from this episode, semi-ironically at any rate? God, what are we in for.

So, presumably the ‘oof, you’re too scared’ link takes us to an abrupt end to the chapter, we’ll check it later. Let’s go on in.

Quick soapbox: as much as I hate the kind of shallow analysis that throws around ‘problematic’ as a summary judgement of a work - nah actually, you can’t just disclaim shit under ‘challenging or controversial material’. By the same token that you can write whatever shit you want in a Homestuck computer game, critics - and random nerds on the internet, which is to say, the entire audience of this game - can discuss it however we find appropriate.

Nevertheless, you haven’t actually done anything worse than make me lick a clown’s armpit so far, and we can approach challenging themes in a way that says something meaningful and important, so let’s see what you have for us, V. To be honest I’m expecting some kind of portrayal of sexual violence given all the disclaimers, but who knows.

The party sounds like hell.

To Lynera, who remains glued to our arm, it’s ‘more than she was expecting’. But before we can leave, Lanque arrives.

I was wrong about what I thought was Lanque’s theme. Lanque’s theme is a slow, mournful saxophone piece. Maybe the music before was Lynera’s theme, and I just forgot how it went?

The narration mentions a ‘curious red stain’ on Lanque’s shirt. They’re obviously going for a whole ‘sexy vampire’ type thing with him. Maybe a Twilight parody, with Lynera in the Bella role? That would be a little dated, though.

I vaguely recall that it was said at some point that the jadebloods were all women. Which makes me suspect that Lanque is a trans guy, and this story is gonna touch on themes of transness and such. That could be something I completely confabulated, though. I’d check the wiki but no doubt it’s been updated by now, and I don’t want to spoil myself on this arc.

He seems to be in a flirty mood. Not sure how old either of these two are supposed to be.

Oh yeah. The knifemeter actually hasn’t shown up in this episode so far. He expresses surprise that Lynera has friends. Or at least, friend.

Eesh, this guy gonna be another Zebruh?

Lanque asks about us and we blather about being an alien, and also general disaster.

It’s really hard to get the sense that this is a loud party where we can barely hear each other over the noise, given both the narration and the soft jazz background.

He says something about not biting unless asked. So if it’s not already obvious... either a genuine rainbow drinker (hey, if Kanaya could do it at age 6 sweeps/13 years, no doubt he could at age... whatever age he is!), or someone who likes pretending to be one.

Anyway, our protag is apparently not overcome by friendship lust at this point, and tries to play wingman and put Lanque’s attention back onto Lynera. This... doesn’t go as well as expected.

(2.43 sweeps, that is - about 5.3 years)

Hmm, why would that be? This could be like, a transphobia thing? Do trolls have that? I’d say of course they fucking do, but apparently they don’t have homophobia, and their gender system... well who the hell knows how troll gender works, having all the signifiers of gender in the real world but none of the material consequences.

Anyway, Lanque calls Lynera a ‘nasty little bitch’. But then immediately says he’s not one to criticise.

So... maybe it’s not a trans thing? We’ll see. Lanque continues being a huge dick, suggesting that Lynera is interested in him because the ordeals are coming, and she wants to take the chance to fuck before they roll around.

Lynera is kind of... not surprisingly pretty hurt.

The narrator challenges Lanque on his rudeness without a choice.

Ah, the classic ‘she deserved it’ defence. Second only to the ‘it didn’t happen, but if it had, they would have deserved it anyway’ defence.

The protag demands to know why Lanque even invited Lynera if it was just to have such a huge go at her like that. Lanque’s explanation is... kind of unclear.

It’s not like she got much of a chance to defend herself there. So far my impression of Lanque is: this guy’s a huge cock. Or possibly a huge nook. Idk what the troll equivalent is.

The narrator decides to ‘Switzerland out of’ this conversation. They say this out loud, of course. Who needs an internal monologue, these days?

Lanque invites us to stay - we’re ‘much more interesting’ anyway. Eesh. I’m inclined to look for a ‘fuck right off where’s my pepper spray’ button, but that’s just me being a lesbian I guess. (Pepper spray is also illegal in the UK. I’m pretty sure.)

Yeah, you said it. He says he’s got ‘less time to waste than most’.

Bryn sees a meta joke about the narrative structure, Bryn clicks the screenshot button.

(Speak of the screenshot button, I had to rebind it to make it easier to paste the screenshots, you see in Ubuntu-- oh, you’re asleep?)

Anyway I kind of expected a choice around about now, but no, we barrel forwards, and end up dancing with Lanque. He takes our hand and leads us to another part of the house.

At that point, Elwurd shows up! I wonder how much of the cast is set to make an appearance in this chapter. If it’s all 35 trolls we’ve encountered so far, this is gonna be a long chapter!

Elwurd seems to be Lanque’s dealer. Not sure what drug she’s selling exactly. Apparently ‘you a drone?’ is the Alternian equivalent of ‘you a cop?’...

Anyway, Lanque buys the drug, and peer pressures us to take it. We’re like, nuh-uh.

We did not, we tell him, ask him to buy drugs for us.

I’m proud of you, protagonist. At the beginning of this story you’d have done anything to get a friend.

At that point, Diemen makes his reappearance. We really are going through the entire cast here, huh.

Yeah. That one’s just too obvious.

Anyway, undrugged, we get to dancing.

God, V, we get it, you want to fuck trolls. The narrator goes with it, though.

I find it kind of interesting how, like... our protagonist in the beginning and ending sketches is pretty much like, a marshmallow, indicating that they represent some kind of AFGNCAAP. But over time, little assumptions leak in. For example, we’re some kind of American nerd - our education system included a ‘high school’, and we had the option to learn Spanish there. We are relatively physically unfit. The wordplay suggests we know English.

Sometimes it’s deliberate - clearly someone made a choice to make it so that our protagonist has opinions about rap and knows a bit about professional wrestling, to suit the themes of the chapters. Those aren’t like, presumed traits assumed of the Homestuck audience, but things that kind of carve out a specific identity

So yeah... we’ve already had the whole ‘cheese person’ thing in Fozzer’s route, and here they’re straight up declaring the protag has pale skin. (Which doesn’t mean they’re white, necessarily, but they are apparently not Black, say.) I think that’s kind of a shame - a wasted opportunity.

Homestuck has already traded a lot on the ambiguity of its characters, which the fandom tends to read as implicitly white, except for like, a relatively small corner. This came to a head at points - most infamously the ‘CAUCASIAN’ controversy during the trickster mode phase, when Hussie ‘jokingly’ declared that his previously ambiguous characters (shaded pure #FFFFFF white, implying a ‘blank slate’) were ‘CAUCASIAN’ in bright flashing letters - at least while in trickster mode. After backlash, the panels were left as-is, but ‘CAUCASIAN’ was replaced with ‘PEACHY’.

Friendsim could have been an opportunity to improve the record a bit, especially as its narrative explicitly addresses many questions of societal oppression and occasionally makes explicit analogues to racism. But... they didn’t do that. Alas.

Anyway, moving on.

Apparently I’m very predictable because the very next panel addresses this exact line of thought.

I feel like this and the ‘not racist’ joke in the previous arc by ‘V’ are kind of... well I don’t know anything about ‘V’, and what they might be intending by these jokes. Here, it’s kind of parodying the whole thing in Homestuck rather explicitly... but whether it’s like, challenging it? There’s definitely a reading that’s like... pointed sarcasm, challenging the source material’s noncommital laziness.

Hey art interpretation is hard lol.

V’s writing is unusually striking, in a way I’m not quite sure how I feel about. I will think more about that once we��ve fully explored this chapter.

Things are getting pretty meta. He comments how we’re paper thin and he can see our blood. We’re like, ok, so you’re a vampire then?

This is the kind of thing! Writing that’s like... on the edge of like, telling a story and just directly talking to the reader, pushing us to engage with ambiguity and metaphor.

To release the tension a bit, the narrator does a ‘sexy dance’.

Anyway, we don’t get to find out what Lanque really thinks of our sexy dancing. Because at that point, Bronya shows up. Lanque decides it’s time to go.

...to a respiteblock, where else. So much for this being a friendsim and pointedly not a dating sim.

We are, it seems, safe. Lanque politely asks if we’d like to kiss. There’s another reminder that this is a very nsfw not for kids scene about to go down in this room right now.

So that’s apparently going to be our decision here. FUCK THE BOY/DO NOT FUCK THE BOY

...no, that’s not our choice. We’re kissing the boy no matter what. This is also portrayed in first person view, because consistency is important!

Apparently our blood tastes ‘sharp and dangerous - like a weapon’.

I feel like this is about to answer a whole fucking lot of fandom questions. At least as far as Hiveswap canon is concerned - arguably a separate entity to Homestuck canon, though obviously, like an expanded universe, designed to be read almost exclusively with intertextuality in mind. An elaboration, I guess.

There’s more like... hey check it out we’re going NSFW. Still nothing like a choice button yet.

One thing I find interesting is like... while this game is packed with lesbians of various stripes, and evidently many of the writers are gay or bi women, all the trolls who get really horny scenes have been boys. (Two of them written by ‘V’, admittedly). Mallek first with his shirtless scene, then much more recently Marvus, and now Lanque.

Also look at these guys. Pretty sure V has a type.

Anyway, the narrator makes the mistake of saying something vaguely derogatory about buckets.

Not sure like... what he finds derogatory there. Mentioning ‘buckets’ vs ‘pails’ (might be a distinction between reproductive and non-reproductive sex?), or saying that he doesn’t seem to have one? He says it’d be his first time.

With an alien, huh. *xenofucker fist bump*

Instead of a sex scene, we get a lore drop.

Once he gets shipped offworld, there will be no more ‘sneaking out of the caverns’. To Lanque, this effectively means his life will be over. This is his last chance to fuck!

A little overdramatic, dude!

Before we can get to it, Bronya interrupts.

So we get interrupted by Bronya. This is finally our choice point. Do we dob Lanque in, or do we fuck?

Regarding ‘problematic’, the main thing I’m seeing is like... Lanque is, at best, barely of age. Since he’s talking about getting shipped offworld soon, I’m guessing he’s close to troll adulthood. In terms of real-world narratives, this is taking on the general tone of ‘college story’ - complete with allusion to a frat party.

I think like... I’m going to read this whole visual novel, and write what I think about it. However, I can also totally understand why you would not want to read this kind of ‘first time’ story. So I’m going to leave that branch to a readmore at the end of the post. Above the cut, to give you all some kind of ending, and we’ll go down the ‘call his mum’ branch. Lol it’s not nearly as nsfw as they make it sound, there’s nothing that really need readmores, nevermind this lol.

Bronya busts the door open and tells him to get dressed immediately.

Lanque gets his mean streak back on, and goes in on Bronya now.

He does love the word ‘bitch’, does Lanque. He tells her she’s not actually his lusus (oh yeah, lusii... it’s been a while since we’ve seen one honestly. The last one was the goat.) She slaps him. He pretends like it was a sex thing.

This is not pretty. Bronya launches into a lecture on Lanque: sneaking out, being an ass to Lynera, and...

Yeah, maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t get further involved.

Apparently he’s not deterred by the fact that we literally called Bronya up to get out of fucking him, and adds us on Chittr before he leaves.

So that’s an ending. Sweet look, protagonist.

But it’s not the ending ending. We get a final screen.

Sure, I want to understand. Is this going to be some kind of direct artist-to-reader commentary on what they were trying to accomplish with that chapter?

The text box turns white, and the font changes. I bet this is Doc Scratch. So no, probably not that. In fact, this segues straight into the epilogue. I think there are different versions of the epilogue depending how you approach the final chapter, or else we were supposed to play the other branch before Lanque, so for the sake of putting the epilogue at the end, I’ll save it for a future post. (I’ve already written it up.)

Now, the other Lanque branches. First of all, refusing at the NSFW notice.

So they poke fun at the reader for like, not accepting the NSFW notice. Uh-huh. You know that Steam doesn’t automatically give a mature content warning if you’ve set up your account that way right? Which I guess is my own fault lol.

Anyway, doing this leads to like... a totally different arc, and a totally different canon. Huh, I genuinely expected they’d like just end the story there.

It’s a cozy party now, apparently.

This version of Lanque is... different.

For one thing, he’s got a flower crown. And instead of soft sexy jazz, we have a pretty piano piece. He says hi to Lynera and me.

Hmm. Not entirely un-hornified, then.

Lynera gushes wildly about us, recapping a whole bunch of plot.

It turns out, rather than taking drugs and having sex and other such risqué things, this party is a chill poetry reading.

So I realise this entire branch is just like, an extended joke at the reader. Look how un-edgy this is. We’re going to support our friends and read poetry.

In this one, instead of asking to kiss us, he asks to hold hands before we read poetry. And he says this is a poem about a past relationship, and it might be a bit raw.

We get Lanque’s poem, in full.

I was going to copy-paste the whole thing in, but it’s quite long, so let’s be uncool and respect copyright or whatever because my fingers were getting tired. It is quite good... addressing loss, and memory, and the lingering influence of a past relationship. It makes me wish I had ever developed the ability to appreciate and comment on poetry, because I feel like I just don’t have the vocabulary to comment on it, or what it might connect to, or anything else. The narration agrees: raw, emotional.

I imagine, though perhaps this is presumptuous, it is reflecting something quite real in the real life of ‘V’.

Lynera also gets the chance to read out a poem. She happens to have one on hand. It’s about Bronya, sure enough, and her loneliness and alienation.

Afterwards, she is self-deprecating.

This version of Lanque is kind and reassuring - the complete opposite of his persona in the sexy branch.

We leave with Lynera after hugging it out. Reading her poem, and being with other trolls in this way, seems to have really helped Lynera. There’s another pointed bit of defensiveness at potential critics.

Soapbox: This is the state of discourse, where the complex feelings we have in relation to fictional works must get flattened out into strict ‘rules’. A character can easily support lesbian and bi interpretations; it can be a relief to bi people and upsetting for lesbians when one of those possibilities is ruled out by having her express interest in a man (not that this, ultimately, rules out lesbian interpretations, since a person can of course be mistaken about their feelings).

To lesbians, it is perhaps likely more salient that many characters they identify with end up expressing attraction to men, and this can seem like yet another instance. To bi women, narratives about picking a ‘side’ are perhaps more likely to be salient, and it can be relief to have an explicitly bi character.

The only conclusion we can draw is that gender is a hellish system of punishment and exploitation, and we should seek to be kind to each other and also abolish it forthwith, write our own stories, and abolish the stranglehold that capital holds on all aspects of our lives including the symbolic media we use to understand the world.

All that said, this repetitive defensiveness about ‘problematic’ writing does kind of annoy me a bit, even if I can understand where it comes from. Let your work speak for itself.

Anyway, that’s enough huge essays (I say, falsely). Let’s finish out the branch.

“...right?”

This branch finishes out with a poke at the whole structure of the game so far - the good endings, bad endings, and so on. We’ve not made a friend, but we have made a stronger connecting with an existing one.

I’m not sure how seriously we should take that given the way ‘valid’ has become pretty much a joke word, if this is still an extended dig at the audience, but there we are.

That was a surprisingly long and rich branch for a first choice, which is kind of nice, actually.

If we click ‘no’ on ‘do you want to understand’...

We just get a game over screen with us sitting in our watchtower looking sad.

So now... it’s time for the nsfw section discussed above. Except... it’s a total fakeout.

First of all, we get an implication that it’s not his first time at all. Anyway, then we get to it. Which is to say, we get a fade to silly anime joke. God, this is like those old 4chan stories where they’d set you up for a sex scene and then rickroll you or something.

We get a ‘dorito faced anime boy’ joke I guess?

Afterwards...

Lol.

Anyway, in this branch, he doesn’t add us on chittr. Lol.

So yeah we die of shame. Welp.

God I can’t believe I thought this would actually go there. Of course it would be a joke at the audience.

Looking back, well, you know, reading the metaphors: he’s a predatory guy and lied through his teeth to get into our pants. Obviously it’s not his first time; obviously he’s not about to bugger off to space and never have sex again T_T, obviously the shit he said was just to get us to fuck; this isn’t just cheesy narrative tropes but within the fiction him playing the protagonist in order to get us to fuck. Complete with the whole attempt to drug us, and make it very unambiguously rape. (Which no doubt Elwurd knew). He got us to explicitly consent before we did anything, but also did enough shady shit so as to make that ‘consent’ kind of questionable when viewed later.

Viewed in that light... what I originally thought was just someone writing a horny fantasy about a hot dominating guy who’s totally into you~ is actually like... a pretty sharp piece of writing about shit pulled by men. There were plenty of warning signs - the ‘objectifying’ way he looks at you, the way he attempts to drug you, etc. I would like to imagine that IRL, rather than taking it as a piece of fiction, I wouldn’t be vulnerable to the same tactics. (Well, obviously I wouldn’t from a guy, at any rate). But it’s kind of a nicely written piece to make you feel stupid and taken advantage of afterwards like... why the fuck did you go along with this.

Though given that this kind of thing is something that people like... actually go through, I feel like they could have warned for it better than ‘challenging and controversial material’. Yes, that might have robbed it of some of its power; but it would also mean that it wouldn’t trigger people who have trauma over this exact kind of thing.

So.

“V”.

Honestly, my strongest feeling about “V” is one of respect. Both their stories have been a weird blend of cheeky, challenging and playful, with some very astute elements and an enormous amount of energy and intensity. They’re prepared to fuck with the reader in ways both silly (lick the troll’s armpit!) and rather more serious (this whole arc), they fuck around with canonicity and narrative structure in creative ways... I wonder what else they’ve written?

There remains only these two clown twins, and the epilogue.

Barzum and Baizli

To finish out the set, we have another pair. The Alternian text says ‘The Soleil Twins’, so I guess that’s their surname. The twins are written by Kieran Miranda, who previously wrote Azdaja, Stelsa and Charun.

The story begins with day nearing, and the protagonist friendless. They get the idea to like... head over to relax with Skylla, but before they can, they run into a house.

A very haunted looking house.

An easy choice for us to begin. ‘No fucking way’ naturally skips this arc, right?

Nope, back at the house. We get another choice: leave left or right. I picked left. I doubt it matters.

Yep, that kind of house. We can’t escape.

After a struggle, we reach the door.

Inside, we immediately pass out with a sense of nausea. Lovely. This can only go well. We hear something like bugs skittering away.

The mansion does at least seem to be explorable. Unfortunately, the door leads to a portrait gallery full of clowns, which is not the most welcome place to end up.

Someone tunes one of the portraits. It turns out to be a TV. Dramatic piano chords come in.

Oh hey it’s some friends.

Their shtick is that the one on the right finishes the one on the left’s sentences, the one on the left speaks in all lower case, and the one on the right speaks in all caps.

They want us to find them. They’re very bored you see, and want to play a game. This is, I understand, an allusion to the Saw series of horror movies, in which I gather a person places people in buildings full of sadistic traps, monitored by various cameras and a small puppet with spiral cheeks. So I guess that’s us now.

We get our first real choice.

I think the door is too obvious. If there’s not another exit, we’ll have to take the door anyway - though that’s likely a different branch, realistically speaking.

We discover a hidden door. Behind it is... a hole in the ground.

I guess we have instant-death options later than usual in this chapter. Our final thought is about the terrible loss of our Chittr profile.

Well, that��s fine. Let’s see what happens if we go straight into the house instead of wandering around.

Approaching the house immediately just skips the wandering around; the text is the same. It was a fake choice. Skipping forward, let’s see what happens if we take the obvious door, not the hidden one.

As we move down the hallway, the lights come on and the walls start bleeding. Lovely. Glorious sense of interior decoration. Tip top.

Beyond the door, we end up in another dark room. Maybe this one will be more of a true CYOA, with death options in every room.

But no. Not immediately, anyway. Ropes come out of the ground and tie us up. The two trolls who were watching us make themselves known.

Carnivalish music kicks in. We finally get a clear view of our captors.

Baizli right (allcaps), Barzum left (lowercase). I’ll try to remember that.

The twins say some predictably sinister stuff about removing our intestines (acid tubes, in trollspeak). The narrator grumbles about once again being reduced to the status of ‘torture muppet’.

When we express a desire to leave, Barzum and Baizli swap both demeanour and capitalisation rule. Now Baizli looks sad, and speaks in lowercase, while Barzum is pissed and speaks in caps.

These two twins, in the tradition of creepy twins, seem to share one mind. Which means they can hardly prank each other! They need someone else.

They rev up a chainsaw and suddenly... we’re back in the same room we started.

Looks like we’ve had another bit of time fuckery from The Powers That Be. Compare Fozzer. The loops kick in, faster and faster. Glued. Buried alive.

Having read the epilogue, all I’ll say is that it seems like someone is trying very hard to push us onto a timeline that ‘works’.

There’s a joke about time loop movies which I don’t get because I haven’t seen very many time loop movies.

After ‘20 or so’ loops, we decide we’ve had enough. But we get a choice of what to do about it.

Let’s try ‘Fuck this.’ first.

This turns out to mean attempting to intimidate the twins instead of begging them to release us.

While they’re baffled by this display, we make a break for an air vent. Surprisingly, we make good our escape. There’s a mention of all our jogging training with Stelsa, which happened in a non-canonical timeline - there was a whole thing about it! - but fair enough. Guess that’s another thing that persists between timelines. Or maybe the protag just thinks they went jogging with Stelsa in this timeline.

We find we’ve missed a bunch of texts from Skylla while we were out, and plan to head over there. But alas... the space loop is still in effect.

We end up back at the house. Unable to escape from the pocket dimension, the branch ends...

So let’s try the other option: ‘remember who you are’.

Come, try to remember...

And that is, of course... FRIENDSHIP. This time, we have something to say to the clowns (after ensuring we haven’t pissed ourselves).

Not killing us is apparently a novel idea for the twins. Or rather, they didn’t plan to kill us - just cut us up a bit, unaware that we wouldn’t heal right back up. The protag corrects the misconception.

So now we’re teaching the creepy clown kids the meaning of friendship. Novel!

The lights come up and they put on a little circus show for us. Apparently this building is not their hive.

They show us various other dangerous-looking circus tricks with the torture/circus equipment. Ah, says the narrator, so risking their lives is these kids’ hobby.

It turns out these kids hatched from the same egg. They tell us they do in fact share a mind entirely - one mind, two bodies.

And at last we end up chilling out and sharing stories.

With this friendship established, we sense a shift of some kind. We take this as a sign that the door might have finally opened.

Not only is the door open, but the ‘pocket dimension’ has dissipated too. The power of friendship! ...or fulfilling some secret design of whoever created the pocket dimension. Mmm.

How touching.

There’s a fakeout victory jingle, which turns out to have been a prank. They explain that... the creepy blood seeping walls and so on were their ‘chucklevoodoos’, but as for the time loop... Not them at all.

“Do you want to understand?” asks the prompt again. Time... for the epilogue.

#momestuck #lets read hiveswap friendsim #sex cw

13 notes · View notes

armory-rasa · 6 years

Text

Long tutorial time: How to Take Product Photos That Don’t Suck

If you’re trying to sell your handcrafted work online, then your photos matter so much -- I daresay almost more than the work itself.

“Upcycled” items that are literal trash (but attractively photographed!) can sucker people into paying actual money for them. And on the flip side, the best-quality leatherwork in the world is going to look dubious af when the product shots were obviously taken in someone’s kitchen, lit by fluorescent lights and a camera flash.

You will get more sales and you will be able to charge more for your work if you have professional-looking product photos -- not fair, maybe, but true. So today I am going to show you how to create decent-looking stock photos, ie, a picture of just the thing itself on a backdrop.

(The cat is unrelated -- clickbait, really.)

I’ll admit upfront that I am very, very far from being a photography expert, and I'm sure an expert could do better than me, but I can't afford an expert and probably neither can you. And this isn’t about the mechanics anyway, it’s about the setup, and just making these small changes can seriously up your game.

Step one: camera

Unless you've already got a good camera, your best bet is going to be a smartphone -- and make no mistake, smartphones are a close second, not a distant one. Modern smartphones are phenomenal, they’re far better than even slightly-dated digital cameras. They can't get you the soft-focus background that an actual, professional camera can (the lens simply isn't long enough), but you can approximate that effect with photoshop if you want to, and the set-up I'm demonstrating here doesn't need a fuzzed background anyway.

The only critical feature is that your camera can take sharp, in-focus pictures.

If you don't have a good smartphone, find a friend who does and beg/wheedle/blackmail/bully them into letting you use it for a bit.

Honestly, I've got a good camera, and half the time I still wind up using my phone because I’m too lazy to bust it out.

Step two: backdrop

There are a lot of artistic things you can do if you're taking pictures of a product in situ -- action shots, still lifes, pictures of it worn by models -- and all that will help your customers visualize themselves using the item, but it's also vital to have pictures of JUST the thing, pictures that cleanly and clearly show exactly what the customer is going to be receiving in exchange for the money they throw at you -- aka stock photos.

And for stock photos, you don't want to get creative with your background. In fact, if you can use the same background for many/most of your images, it will contribute to an attractive, coherent look for your shop. That means finding a neutral-toned backdrop that will work with any color item you put on top of it -- white, black, grey, beige, basically.

White can mean a lightbox...

(And there are a million tutorials online for how to rig up your own DIY lightbox)

...or another popular alternative is a white table pushed up against a white wall; the seam between the two is visible, but discreet enough that the eye glides right over it.

Black, you can do with cleverdick manipulation of the settings on an expensive camera, or you can find a non-reflective black backdrop -- which is easier said than done. Fine, dense, matte black velvet (think theatre curtains) is the go-to black backdrop, just make sure you run a lint roller over it before taking pics.

Any other color is going to depend on the backdrop you choose -- I personally have had excellent luck with some warm-grey velvet (?) yardage that I picked up for pennies at a goodwill a million years ago. (I’m not sure what it is -- it has the pile of velvet, but shorter?) I didn’t buy it for that purpose, but it’s since proven to be an incredibly versatile backdrop, and I’ve taken to using it for everything:

etc.

And even if you’re not stumbling onto a super-good-deal at goodwill, a yard or two of your chosen fabric will generally do you fine.

What I don’t recommend is:

- shiny fabric (anything shiny is overall more difficult to photograph -- and shiny spots will draw attention to themselves, rather than your product)

- vivid colors (limits what color items you can display on it; will often clash if the item is close-but-not-quite-the-same color (and what looks fine to your eye may not look fine on film); can distract from the item you’re showcasing)

- patterns (again, distracts from the centerpiece; draws attention to the background; moreover, is hell to clone-brush)

Here is all three of them being the perfect storm of not-a-good-stock-photo:

Which is not to say you can’t do something artistic with it...

...but it’s not very versatile, and it’s not exactly “stock photo” anymore.

One of the reasons I really really like velvet for a backdrop is that there’s nothing in the world easier to clone brush. Which happens, for instance, if I get my roll of photos transferred to the computer and realize there’s some lint I neglected to brush off, or if I was too lazy to iron my backdrop so it’s got wrinkles/creases in it, or if the angle I had to take the photograph from clipped the edge of the backdrop--

--it is super fuckin’ easy to clone all that out. (It also takes the burn tool really well, to darken the edges and point the viewer’s attention toward the middle of the picture, see above.)

Other backdrops that can work are fur (or faux fur):

The great outdoors: mulch, leaves, dirt, sand, etc--

(That was taken at my shitty old apartment complex, so I had to carefully remove the cigarette butts from the shot first. -_-)

(I admit I’ve mostly stopped using these kind of outdoor backdrops -- they’re harder to pull off than wood/concrete/fabric -- but in the hands of someone with an eye for composition, they can definitely be used to good effect, so I’m including them here anyway. You just want to make sure that the background isn’t distracting from the item, which you can sometimes do in post by darkening/fuzzing the background relative to the focal object.)

Concrete:

And wood:

In short, there are many things that are (1) unobtrusive and (2) neutral-colored that will make excellent backdrops.

Professional photography backdrops (essentially, the velvet I have) are close to true neutral, not affecting the “feel” of the picture at all, and there are tons of tutorials online to make your own DIY photography backdrops.

Conversely, you can also use a specific backdrop to help create the mood you want to convey for the piece -- concrete for gritty and urban; fur to evoke a rich and sumptuous feeling (or a primitive one, depending on what you’re selling); wood or rough-spun cloth for something rustic; dirt and leaves to take it back to nature.

I’m not going to say the sky’s the limit, because we’re talking stock photos not ARRRRT!!, you gotta rein it in a bit, but you do have a lot of options -- anything that’s not going to clash with the mood or distract from your product.

Step three: lighting

USE THE FUCKING SUN.

Don’t ever, ever use a flash for product photography, seriously, are you some kind of SAVAGE?

Cardinal sin right there; go straight to hell, do not pass go, etc. Lighting like that, your product looks like it’s drunk at a frat party.

Moreover, unless you are a wildly over-funded professional, and possibly not even then, there is no light source superior to the sun. Sure, if you finish your project at midnight and can’t wait to share it, take some snapshots in your shitty studio light and send them to your friends--

--but do not make that your product listing photo. You can do so much better.

(And notice the color difference too -- natural light tends to be much better at capturing color that is true-to-life. The second picture is far more accurate to the actual item.)

That said, direct sunlight is a HELL NO go. The shadows it casts are way too stark, and details can get lost because the camera has trouble navigating the gap between the super-dark parts of the picture and the super-bright parts.

And it turned out that I’d never bothered to keep any of the photos I took in direct sunlight (because they sucked), so for the purposes of this tutorial, I had to take a couple of my WIPs outside and go make some.

Direct sunlight:

The glare and the obvious shadows make these photos look strikingly amateurish. It draws attention to the background, highlights the fact that the bracers are just sitting in some lame dead grass. These photos look like someone finished making the bracer, carried it ten feet out into their backyard, and snapped a picture.

Which, yeah, is what we’re doing, but it doesn’t have to look it.

By contrast, indirect sunlight, when I move it four feet over into the shade of the house:

Right away, the diffused light (sort of soft-focus?) is more in line with what you see in professional photos. They still need editing before they’d be ready to roll out -- fiddling with contrast/saturation/white balance; clone-brushing out some of the distracting elements in the background; darker shading around the frame to center attention on the product -- but they have the potential to be decent photos now, instead of being critically flawed from the get-go.

When you’re using sunlight as your source, you’re usually going to be setting up either outside in the shade, or inside next to a window.

The context for some of these shots can also be hilariously un-sexy when you zoom out:

Sunlight tends to be much better at retaining the textural details of your work too, because more light means your camera can take a much quicker shot (low light = camera compensates by leaving the lens open longer to collect more light = blur).

If you want to really capture the fine texture of an item, natural light coming from one side (like through a window) is perfect, because of the shadows it casts:

On that note: if you’re trying to use a window as your light source, you may have trouble with the far side of the object being completely lost in darkness:

Which can be artistic, but doesn’t make for a great stock photo.

The solution is not to use another light source, but to use a reflector -- my go-to is white foam-core posterboard:

Which can fill in the shadows that are obscuring parts of your work:

Mirrors or foil can work for this too, but they tend to cast stark/uneven light, whereas the white board diffuses it, and diffusion is pretty much always what you want.

On the subject of diffusion: overcast days are your BEST FRIEND. They basically turn the whole sky into a lightbox for you. You get soft, beautiful light from all directions, muted enough to reduce glare, but there’s still more than enough light to keep your camera happy and your details sharp.

(Man I wish there were more clouds where I lived.)

Here’s an interesting little contrast -- this one was taken on a sunny day, but in the shadow of my house, using a white reflector to move light around:

And then the very next day we had rain, and I was like, hell yeah, and took it outside for more pics:

Obviously both have had the contrast increased to bring out the details, but the mood difference between the two is 100% the weather.

And that is FAR from everything there is to say on the subject of photography lighting, but for the purposes of amateur product photography, those are the important bits.

TL;DR:

- Natural light

- Diffused light

Step 4: post-production

This is also not something I’m an expert in, I’ve learned just enough to get by and called it good enough. (It’s why I lean on overcast days whenever I can, because it eliminates a lot of the lighting problems that I don’t know how to fix in post.)

But here are some of the things that you will find yourself needing to know, and should be looking up how-to’s on for your graphics editor of choice:

White balance/saturation

Light comes in different colors, but the human eye automatically compensates for it, so often times something looks good to your eyes, but then comes out way funky on film.

Indoor lighting tends to be yellow-hued, because that’s what feels warm and comfortable to humans, but it looks nasty in photographs:

Natural light tends to be white (which is why it gives you more accurate colors), getting more blueish as it heads toward evening:

You can compensate for both by adjusting the white balance, in which the program figures out what white is supposed to look like, and then calibrates all the other colors in the picture accordingly.

Brightness/contrast

Is it bright enough to see the details? Is the contrast high enough to make the details POP, instead of blending together into a muddle?

You can apply brightness/contrast adjustments to the full image, and then (if necessary) go in by hand with the burn/dodge tool (brightness up/brightness down) and add extra highlights.

(Don’t go overboard on this though -- this isn't art, this is a product photo, and if you take it too far from the real object, you are lying in your advertising.)

Blur/sharpen

Are the focal points sharp? Sharp areas of an image are what draws the eye, so if your photos are blurry, they’re no good and there’s no fixing them -- grab your camera and go take some more.

Is your background less sharp than the foreground? A too-sharp background will distract from the central point, so sometimes you can put a very subtle blur on it to trick the eye into ignoring it. (Dropping the brightness and the contrast are also both ways to make the background less eye-catching.)

Clone brush

Basically a mini copy-paste tool, you grab parts of the image and copy it onto other parts. This is good for tidying up your background -- coloring in corners that your backdrop didn’t cover, or removing distracting irregularities.

Again, this is one to be used sparingly, because this is product photography, it needs to be accurate, not idealized. You don’t get to scrub off the imperfections and make it look like you’re better at [whatever] than you are.

The only time I consider it acceptable to use the clone brush tool on the actual product is for editing out flaws in the leather itself. It’s a stock photo; customers are not going to be getting the exact item shown in the photo. I’ll be making a new one for them, one that’s not going to have those exact flaws. (It’ll have excitingly new and different flaws! Such is the nature of organic materials.)

Edge gradients

A subtle shadow around the edge of your picture brings the whole thing together, makes the background recede a bit, and directs the eye toward the centerpiece. Too heavy a hand with this will still look nice, but more staged; it alerts the viewer that you’ve been photoshopping and kills the “I woke up like this~” illusion.

Relatively natural:

Dramatic!

Watermarking

You want people to be able to find their way back to you when your work inevitably gets cross-posted without the source (fuck you in the face, pinterest), so it’s not enough to put your initials or abstract logo or illegible signature on it, you need your google-able name or company name.

At the same time, people have been known to crop out (or clone-brush out) watermarks that are big and tacky, so it’s in your best interests to make your watermark tasteful and inoffensive. (Also: ugly watermarks just bring down your whole image, seriously.)

Some of the pictures above are old enough that they’re sporting my older & less professional-looking watermarks, but what I use at the moment is this:

(But, y’know, smaller.)

Best way to do watermarks is usually to create another layer over your image and blend the two. For dark logo/light background, the settings for the new layer are 1) blend mode: multiply, 2) opacity: 85% (adjust as needed). For light logo/dark background, the blend mode is probably going to be “soft light.” And then just paste your logo in the corner of the new layer -- the blend mode means your logo doesn’t have to be transparent, the program just ignores the parts that are lighter/darker than the background.

And that, I believe, is the end. o_O I had no idea I had so many opinions on the subject of product photography.

Again -- I’m not a pro. I don’t know how to use 99% of my camera settings or 80% of my graphics program. (For fuck’s sake, my go-to graphics editor is the bootleg version of Paintshop Pro that I acquired in 1997.) This post represents the sum total of my knowledge on the subject.

But it just goes to show that you can do a lot with only a little, and that your composition and sense of aesthetics are far more important than what gear you’ve got.

#y'all should reblog this #because there are people who NEED TO SEE THIS #much obliged #gremble has opinions #tutorial #photography #diy #making this yo business #long-form tutorial

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mdomroe-blog1 · 5 years

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TecKed Out

OUTLOOK

Everyone has their own personal favorite social media influencers, whether that be Youtubers like, Keaton Milburn, Fitness Bloggers like Tammy Hembrow, or top models like Hailey Bieber. These three famous influencers have three main characteristics in common. They are tall, skinny, and blonde. Growing up I had a great childhood, I was carefree and never had a second thought about the way I looked. In later middle school when I became a part of the social media world these things changed. I started to see the differences that I had from other girls my age and noticed I never could compete with some girls.

[Keaton Milburn is a 21-year-old social media influencer, courtesy of AZ Foothills.]

I’m not here to tell you that skinny blonde girls need to be exterminated from society or to tell you to stop using social media. I’m writing this blog to raise awareness of future implications extreme social media and technology usage could bring to the next generation of young adults. Compared with other developed nations, Americans are more likely to have a higher amount of screen-time than almost any other western society. According to Common Sense Media, American youth, ages 8-18 spend an average of nine hours using any source of media. Instead of living an active lifestyle and learning lifelong skills, we are training our youth to live behind the screen while emphasizing the importance of technical literacy in the workplace. Brianna Crowley compared the older generation to be more of “digital immigrants’” rather than “digital natives”. However, we are not preparing the “digital natives” for the real world, we are teaching them to live like lifeless computer-oriented zombies. Employers are more inclined to hire someone with both computer and communication skills, however CLIMB professional Development and Training ranked strong communication as the top answer. As a society we need to be conscientious of the negative impact’s technology can bring, so we can work toward a well-rounded lifestyle.

[This illustration shows this woman’s struggle to detach herself from social media. (Thrillist)]

MENTAL HEALTH

In 2014 Nielson performed a study to show the negative effects technology has on the developing teen brain, this study showed how technology has negative effects on sleep patterns, self-confidence, social skills, emotions, and personality in teens. Nielson highlights the negatives of social media as a whole, rather than demonstrate what a person goes through on a more intimate level, which is so important to acknowledge. As technology has risen, personal hatred towards one’s own body became extremely prominent. Girls and boys saw true differences between their bodies and ones of famous influencers, which then made teens try and work towards a more “likeable” image. Teens will do anything to fit in, going anywhere from posting scandalous photos to starving themselves, because that is what their favorite celebrity does. The Girl Scouts Research Institute found that ½ of every teen women wish they were as skinny as fashion models. I think it is horrible to see how many girls are affected by social media, if they weren’t subjected to mass amounts of edited content then maybe it would be easy to differentiate between what is real and what is fake.

Body image is something that usually has a negative connotation. When you’re a teen you have so many different things to worry about. Teens stress about the craziest things, personally I have stressed about how my new perfume smelled for hours. I think with just simple posts a teen can completely misconstrue the meaning behind the initial post and work-up their emotions in response. Our brain has been rewired since I was a kid. According to Stephanie Hertzenberg; from Beliefnet, there is a direct connection between your brains ability to process a large influx of information, and the ability to retain information. This recent catastrophe is referred to as “popcorn brain”, and if the brain is subjected to a large amount of stimuli for long periods of time, then the brain will no longer retain large portions of information.

Not only does over indulgence of social media lead to poor cognitive function it also is a main trigger of anxiety and depression. It is so easy to see posts on your feed and compare the amount of likes you receive to another young teen, but while some of us just see that like as a number others take that number to heart. In 2017 the Child Mind Institute conducted a study that shows 92% of teens use or own a smartphone. The Child Mind Institute also found that in half a million high-schoolers depressive symptoms have increased 33% in a five-year span. In that same time teen girls experienced a 65% increase in suicide rates. Technology is a great thing and allows for millions of people to connect from all over the world, but when people feel bad about themselves after going online then why should we promote its use. We should not let cyberbullying be something in this world that could trigger someone to take their own life. Jennifer Mills; a renowned Canadian Psychologist speaks on body image and says teens "… felt worse about their own appearance after looking at social media pages of someone that they perceived to be more attractive than them...". Many are quick to see negatives within this quotation; however, I believe we need to not see it as a negative but see it as an opportunity to change young tech users outlook when on social media. Instead of viewing it as a competition, we need to teach developing youth that it is a form of finding information on others.

[This photo symbolizes how she sees herself based upon others words, and how they stick on her (Social Media Effecting Body Image).]

TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS

We have seen our society move up the ladder with new innovations, with large technology companies constantly working towards releasing the newest update. Apple is the leading tech company in the world and is a great example of a company with a fast turnover rate. Within the last decade, we have moved into the realm of smartphones. With technology at our fingertips our citizens live a very efficient lifestyle. You can completely live a paperless lifestyles if truly necessary, but that may lead to a dependence on any given device. Women and men are constantly on popular modes of social media like YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. If our society is on average spending nine hours on a device, then a large amount of that time is spent on social media. Constant time spent on social media updates teens on the newest tech trends being released, this inclines people to buy more and more products that have very little differences. Zac Hall exemplifies the fast technology turnover rate, by showing how every September Apple releases a completely new model, then just makes small adjustments and rebrands throughout the year. This marketing scheme is what makes Apple and other companies so successful, however they do not show how the consumer is constantly updating to stay hip to cultural trends.

[This is a chart that shows the large increase of price on Apple products (Phillipine Peso.]

PERSONAL REFLECTION

When I was a freshmen in high school, I was completely naïve to all the mean girls in school and what their words could do. I was a pretty shy girl and did not really get into deep conversations with “the cool kids”. One day I had class with this beautiful popular girl named Rachel and she was seated in my table group. I was pretty excited to be in a cool table group, and for her to even know my name. A few weeks went by and I thought Rachel and I had really hit it off on multiple occasions. Little did I know that she was purposefully manipulating me for pure enjoyment. I had found out that she posted a photo on her Snapchat story of me wearing shorts with white paint on the butt. This white stain led to many sexual jokes that I was not expecting nor wanting.

In conclusion, although Rachel and I do not talk anymore her words still linger with me to this day. I feel that without the monumental tear to my self-confidence I would not have grown to be a strong independent leader. I am currently writing this from my hotel room where I am staying in Nashville. I was selected to attend a Leadership Conference here and I truly think back to that time where social media destroyed me, and how I have grown from that experience. Overall, I believe technology has allowed us to transform society and grow into what we are today, but without proper guidance it can go extremely bad.

[These are unfortunately the very old shorts that I got made fun of for when I was so young. Ironically, I brought them to wear to bed.]

[This is me and Jacquelyn Kelly pictured above at the Leadership Conference this past weekend.]

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huntergator65 · 3 years

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Pixelmator Photo

The Pixelmator Pro image editing engine is seriously sophisticated and incredibly powerful. It’s designed exclusively to take advantage of the full power of Mac computers, using advanced Mac graphics technologies like Metal and Core Image. Pixelmator Photo for iPad is here!In this live session I'll show you everything you need to know to get the very best out of this amazing iPad app.

The timeline for many a photographer — at least, this was the case for me — can be outlined somewhat as per the graph below:

Here, photography gear and kit starts out as the ultimate source of inspiration. This inspiration declines steadily over time, but rears its ugly head on occasion.

The inspiration derived from other photographers takes essentially an inverse effect as gear and kit do. When gear and kit delusions subside, the drive to emulate your favorite photographers rises.

And finally, your own skill set not only grows over time, it also becomes the main source of your own inspiration over time.

I’ve developed a bit of a list for the second step — photographers like Kate Holstein, Sam Nute, Finn Beales, Dan Tom, and more are stunningly skilled and worthy of emulation. Their compositions are great — often, near perfect — and their colors are their own.

I think the prevailing advice to improve your abilities as a photographer is to focus on composition. Work with prime lenses, learn to position your body and camera in the right spot, and ensure all the pieces of the puzzle fit into your photograph beautifully.

Color is just the icing on top of the composition cake, and everyone likes different brands of icing, right?

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Pixelmator Photo’s latest update brought the power of Pixelmator Pro’s ML Match Colors from the Mac to the iPad, promising the ability to match the color palettes between sets of photos. ML Match Colors is wonderfully implemented, quickly performed, and easy to use. It promises to use all the powers of the iPad.

But does it promise the power of stealing your favorite photographers’ color palettes? Will it make your photos look as good as your favorite photographers’ photos?

Of course not!

As is always the case in photography, there are a multitude of variables at play. ML Match Colors handles one specific variable: color.

Using ML Match Colors to Match Your Own Photos

This is the method that I expect the Pixelmator team both wants and expects customers to implement when using ML Match Colors. At first blush, ML Match Colors seems best designed for applying a relatively close color palette to all of your photos in a set.

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The original photo on the left and my personal edits on the right. Clearly, these two photos are very, very different.

To test the power of ML Match Colors, I used a single photo of my own from a few years ago. Evidently, I’ve heavily edited this photo, so I exported a copy of the original photo and a copy of the edited photo from Lightroom to my camera roll.

From there, I opened the original raw photo in Pixelmator Photo, dragged an instance of Photos into Split View, and dragged my edited into Pixelmator Photo to match the color palettes.

In general, if an app can or can’t deliver on a promise, it’s usually due to improper expectations. And since I originally came into this thinking ML Match Colors would also match saturation, hue, intensity, and exposure all at once, well, I was originally disappointed. Here’s the result:

But upon further inspection, Pixelmator Photo actually performed great work in matching the colors in these two photos. In retrospect, it’s obvious: the colors are properly matched. However, to get to my original end result, I had to jump into the color tools in Pixelmator Photo to dial back intensity, hue, and saturation of individual colors. After maybe a minute or two of experimentation, I came to this end result:

Not bad, actually! Not bad at all.

As I mentioned above, ML Match Colors is explicitly designed to match colors — matching any other elements of exposure, saturation, hue, and more either has to be done manually or through other forms of Pixelmator Photo’s machine learning features.

Using ML Match Colors to Match Someone Else’s Photos

This whole section likely gets dicey, so I want to ensure I give credit where credit is due, and I want to ensure that the end result of “stealing” someone’s color does not actually happen. I fully believe, after you’ve read through this section, you’ll agree that a photographer’s stylistic brand and color choices are not in jeopardy thanks to ML Match Colors.

So, Finn Beales is one of the professional photographers I mentioned above who I have a ton of professional respect for. Beales has one of my favorite photography blogs on the planet, shoots some of the best travel and brand photography in the world right now, and has provided a wealth of photographic knowledge in his photography course at Strohl Works. Tableau jira connector. If you want to get a behind-the-scenes look at how Beales works and how he achieves some of his results, that course was some of the best money I’ve spent in the last two years.

Finn Beales’s tremendous travel photography — known as “72 Hrs In…” — is showcased on his personal site. There are a wealth of photos to digest in that section of his blog. One of my favorites is his commissioned work for Travel Alberta, a province and location here in Canada I had the opportunity to travel to myself.

So, with that backstory out of the way, you can likely understand where I’m going with this. Here’s Finn Beales’ photo of a man at Lake Louise in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada:

Photo by Finn Beales, used solely for color reference and nothing more.

And here’s my photo of that exact same location, albeit with slightly different composition:

It’s very hard to say whether Beales and I shot the photo at the same time of day or in the same kind of weather, among other variables. We were at Lake Louise in the earliest part of the morning, so the orange glows on the mountaintop peaks are about as close as I could get to the oranges in Beales’ photo.

And here’s the result after dragging and dropping Beales’ photo into Pixelmator Photo:

Did my photo change at all? You’d be hard-pressed to tell. I believe many of the colors indeed match those in Beales’ photo, but again, hue, saturation, luminosity, brightness, and other variables play a major role in keeping Beales’ stylistic color choices his own.

This is good news, in nearly every facet of the story. The learning lessons I’m taking away from this:

Composition remains the most important element of photography. If you don’t have good composition, the amount of beautiful color you add or take away from a photograph won’t magically transform it into a mystical work of art.

Understanding “color” involves much, much more than simply dragging and dropping one photo onto the other. To achieve a certain look, a full understanding of the color wheel, color and light curves, and color tools is still required.

For all the work professionals have put in to create their own style, brand, and “look”, they can be rest assured that other photographers like myself won’t be able to replicate that same look with a simple feature in an iPad app.

Other Updates in Pixelmator Photo 1.2

Despite the title ML Match Colors feature debuting in Pixelmator Photo 1.2, the 1.2 app update housed plenty of powerful features for photographers looking to utilize the iPad more and more in their workflows.

Notice the trackpad cursor right in the middle of the photo on the left and the re-shaped cursor in the top right in the right photo. Cursor support is very nicely baked into the latest Pixelmator Photo update.

Trackpad Support: iPadOS 13.4’s new trackpad and cursor support has taken the platform by rage. Any app designed with many custom elements has struggled to organically adopt cursor support out of the gate, so updates have been needed to have all apps feel at home in iPadOS 13.4. Pixelmator Photo 1.2 brings full-blown trackpad support to the app, allowing you to whiz around with a mouse or trackpad much like you would on a Mac.

Split View: We chose Adobe Lightroom CC as the best photo editing app for the iPad because of its ecosystem, and we chose Darkroom as the runner-up because of Darkroom’s adoption of iOS technologies. With Pixelmator Photo 1.2, you can throw another app into the runner-up column. Pixelmator Photo may now have the best iPadOS technology support of any photo editing app available. The app now supports Split View, which is very powerful in how ML Match Colors is used. The app adeptly uses the iOS photo library rather than maintaining its own photo library housed within the app. And all the machine learning features built into the app make it one of, if not the, most powerful iOS photo editor available for the iPad.

Adjustment Intensity and Recent Adjustments: Pixelmator Photo 1.2 now allows you to fine-tune the intensity of color adjustments and presets. As described above, these tools are fundamental to achieving a desired look after ML Match Colors has done its job.

You’re also able to quickly reference and copy the adjustments from your most recently edited photos in Pixelmator Photo 1.2. Legal audio transcription. This, combined with ML Match Colors, make for a quick and easy workflow to edit a batch of photos with the same colors and settings.

Wrap Up

ML Match Colors debuted as a powerful machine learning feature in Pixelmator Pro for the Mac. The feature alone almost had me download Pixelmator Pro. However, I held off, knowing my workflow was going to increasingly move to the iPad. I admit, I didn’t expect ML Match Colors to come to the iPad so quickly.

I’m glad I waited. Because I’m positive I would have been initially disappointed with the ML Match Colors feature on the Mac.

Now that I’ve had a chance to try the feature, I’m more likely to purchase Pixelmator Pro for the Mac, simply because of the feature.

Pixelmator Photo App

So much of the iPhone and iPad’s being is wrapped up in simplicity. The devices themselves are fairly simply to use and can somehow house multiple generations of people into their user bases. This air of simplicity, applied to photography, almost makes it feel like you should be able to take a boring photo of the tree in your backyard and turn it into a masterpiece worthy of the Louvre.

The machine learning features in Pixelmator Photo are a taste of this simplicity, but don’t let your imagination run wild. Machine learning features in Pixelmator Photo take advantage of the deepest iOS technologies, eliminate a plethora of difficult and complicated tasks, and make editing photos easier than ever. They aren’t a perfect, one-tap-done editing tool.

ML Match Colors may be the very best machine learning tool available inside Pixelmator Photo. Drag and drop your favorite photos — or perhaps you can create and use your own color templates — to match the colors, then tweak everything else inside Pixelmator Photo’s vast array of editing tools. If you really want to make it easy, enable all the ML toggles in the tool array, hit export, and you’re done.

We named Pixelmator Photo as the photo editing app with the most potential in our big review. This 1.2 update really, really builds out some of that potential. And if this is just the start, Pixelmator Photo may move its way up the ladder of the best photo editing iPad apps.

Must-Have, Most-Used Photography Apps

Pixelmator Photo Mask

We spend an inordinate amount of time sorting through hundreds of apps to find the very best. Our team here at The Sweet Setup put together a short list of our must-have, most-used apps for taking and editing photos on iPhone and iPad.

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