This is your yearly reminder that Garfield the cat's birthday is not, in fact, June 19th. Though the comic titled Garfield debuted on June 19, 1978, the character himself first appears in an earlier comic by Jim Davis called Jon, which debuted on January 8, 1976. For reasons known only to himself, until around 2019 Jim Davis entirely disclaimed the existence of Jon, to the point that his official biographies make no mention of it and falsely give the 1978 date as Garfield's first published appearance. Garfield's real birthday is January 8th.

Hello tumblr, please look at this picture of people watching a stereoscopic (= 3D) projection around 1858:

Image source: Jens Ruchatz: Licht und Wahrheit: eine Mediumgeschichte der fotografischen Projektion. Wilhelm Fink Verlag 2003, p. 187. Curiously, there is no further information about where Herr Ruchatz found this picture.

If you don't mind me asking - what do you think Dream's attitude/reaction towards Tolkien's works (including the legendarium!) would be? (I'm asking a lot of Sandman bloggers this, because I'm extremely curious regarding your takes on this.)

oh! hang on i gotta brush up on my tolkien because i haven't actually read any of the books since like. 2011.

i guess my main thought would be about how dream missed like, 95% of his work when he was stuck in his Jar. my understanding (read: google search) is that tolkien was building up the mythology for his stories before 1916 (when dream was captured), but most of it was not finished/published until a while after.

(this became an insane and mostly unrelated rant i am so so sorry)

i think a lot about how much of his own... area of work and power dream missed when he was trapped. the 20th century, generally speaking, was a time of rapid growth in storytelling methods and media more generally. dream missed almost all of radio, particularly radio as it became a medium for stories. radio was invented in the late 1890s but didn't see a proper rise into a storytelling medium, rather than mainly a direct communication one, until around the 30s. so dream missed the creation and growth of the first, i guess you would call it, networked storytelling, and technological storytelling, and what was... probably? the biggest return to an auditory type of storytelling since the original oral tradition, folk tales, great epics etc, for radio at its peak of cultural relevance (at least in the US and probably the ""West"" more generally, alas i can't speak as knowledgeably for other parts of the world, obviously plenty of other parts of the world had radio in the early 20th century and onward, but i don't know much about its use as a fictional storytelling medium versus for news and government broadcasts. something to look into! part of why radio became such a medium in the usa was because of our rampant capitalism and commercialism lol, so less capitalistic places might have approached it differently - here, advertisers wanted to figure out a way to monetize radio better, but obviously people aren't going to just listen to hours of ads, so they packaged them around stories, live music performances, and variety shows. that's where soap operas as a form come from -- they were originally sponsored by soap companies! also serials, though of course books have also been serialized in the past. and sponsored radio programs also birthed the sort of episodic comedies that eventually evolved into the half hour TV comedies we know today)

which also means - as a direct result of missing radio, dream also missed the rise of television as a medium - it grew directly out of radio, even the big networks we know today, CBS, NBC, and ABC were originally radio networks. television has ended up being a huge change in visual storytelling, not only in its inception, but especially in its more recent years - it's probably the only long-form audiovisual storytelling medium, which is something that didn't really exist before. huge shift in storytelling possibilities. he also missed the development of comic books, and the internet, and the resulting increased accessibility of art and storytelling to both artists and art lovers. he missed an absolutely huge, HUGE shift in the democratization of art and the ability to share it. and, once again, the development of totally new methods of storytelling in the form of internet video! not to even mention the accessibility of MUSIC, music recording and sharing was still in its infancy when dream was imprisoned and now you can get, and make, and share pretty much any music imaginable! and the new genres! and the intermediality of everything and the cross-cultural awareness!

this is not even getting into the new ease of photography, or film, which was also relatively new in 1916. imagine going into a coma when there were only silent films, and waking up to everyone and their mother making tiktoks. the last film you saw was one of chaplin's or something and then you come back and see interstellar in imax 3d. i think i'd explode. (dream would love film, too, it's very dreamlike)

dream returning to the waking world in 2022 and immediately having the entirety of tiktok beamed directly into his head:

(another thing i think about a lot but won't get into because i'm already rambling - hob witnessing the entire development of accessible writing from the printing press to fucking social media. insanity. i want to pick his brain on it

what pushed hob over the edge, do you think. what's the one thing he saw written online that briefly made him regret ever getting involved in printing at all and wish everyone was illiterate again. it was not porn, btw, mr. monsterfucker gadling can handle anything, ok. no, it was something much worse...)

anyway. rambling over. this is all to say that i am not a tolkien expert and haven't read much of his stuff anywhere recently - though i was quite obsessed with it in middle/high school - so my main thought is in relation to dream getting cut off from all of these great stories. it must have been like, to put it flippantly, your favorite tv show getting cancelled halfway through after a cliffhanger XD. he has all these stories from great storytellers - tolkien included - storytellers who are building their whole own worlds in his realm, storytellers he's nurturing and supporting in his own way - and gets ripped away from them. and when he returns, they're all gone.

here's hoping someone who knows more about tolkien can give you an answer more specifically relevant to that. that's all i got for now 😂

Advertisement for Buster Keaton's The General (1926), in "The General," (United Artists Pressbook, 1926), leaf 24. From the Media History Digital Library.

Hey people! Just as long as the Welcome to Night Vale and People Not Knowing It thing is still fresh: We all agree that this is a problem, right? Even beyond jut Night Vale. In general, I keep seeing posts about young people not knowing milestones of queer media history.

And this is on us, we failed them there.

So, I propose: Queer Media Monday (#Queer Media Monday). Just make a post every Monday about some important piece of queer media that you feel people should know about.

Let’s see if we can get this to catch on.

don’t make me send you to Misrepresenting Uncanny Valley Theory Jail again

me: ...and so, while it does depict dolls killing, the 1907 silent film “The Dolls’ Revenge” cannot be truly held up as an example of the modern “evil doll” genre. it would have been classified as normal, didactic children’s media at the time, and not their equivalent of our horror movies (generally for adults, and meant specifically to frighten without the need of an implied moral)

the plumber who came to fix my dishwasher: please. please unlock the doors

me: in a bit. now, if we consider M.R. James’ 1923 short story, “The Haunted Dolls’-House,” which I have annotated for you here...

So much of this is good. SO MUCH OF THIS IS GOOD. (It's on the longer side but every bit of it is educational)

But why does any of this matter? What’s lost when movies just become a series of memeable one-liners and action scenes that can be distilled down into a gif? What’s lost when the necessary implication of the audience in the experience of viewing a film is removed and we become merely passive consumers of moving images that stir nothing in us, that don’t engage our bodies, our hearts, our minds, or shake us from our late capitalist catatonia? Why does it matter that we now only interact with trauma narratives through prepackaged IP nuggets delivered to us neatly in a series like WandaVision (created by Jac Schaeffer, 2021), or the Halloween franchise? What’s lost when the sex scene disappears from our movies, when the very presence of sexual desire and bodily expression incites revulsion? What’s lost is our connection to one another beyond the fetters of capitalism, indeed the very thing that makes us human. What’s lost is our “sense of the real” (Telotte), the visceral and radical experiences that Verhoeven’s Hollywood films, even and especially through the persistence and abundance of sex scenes, were dedicated to recovering, all of which today’s cinema is inevitably without. What’s lost is the last thing that stands between us and the system that forever seeks to turn us into nothing more than another product.

Early Compact Disk (CD) mockup in Space Voyager #00 (1981)

Electronic Media 1990s 20th Century Media History Communication IT Changes World || autradingpost - ebay

Notes From The Archives: THE DROID ZINE

Welcome to @mcrzines , a blog database aiming to collect the history of My Chemical Romance Fanzines!

Normally, this involves finding and reblogging posts documenting what zines have existed, are still on sale for you to collect right now (!!), or zines that are currently seeking artists and writers! However, not all zines have a Tumblr presence; thus, we introduce NOTES FROM THE ARCHIVES, where I'll document zines found on other platforms, or maybe even post other notes from time to time!

The PORNODROID ZINE (often also known as The Droid), is a multi-issue zine created in traditional DIY greyscale collage style, collecting illustrations, testimonials and essays from fans of My Chemical Romance. This zine is mainly promoted on the instagram account, DroidZine.MCR . Will include the link in a reblog.

Earliest posts date back to July 2018, with the lead-up to issue 1. Currently, The Droid is running strong at 3 whole issues, with Issue 4 having been sent to printers in early 2021.

There have unfortunately been no posts since January 2021, with the most recent activity being promotions for issue 4 and its merch, as well as a Draw This In Your Style challenge for readers.

Here's more info on the zine, taken from their story highlights! Image descriptions are in the alt text.

Consider showing The Droid some love! While past issues are sold out, I recommend following them in case the creator returns with updates.

Do you own a copy of The Droid zine? Did you contribute? Tell us about it! We'd love to know more about this project!

Know about any MCR zines this blog hasn't posted about yet? Drop us a line in our ask submissions or messages!

I suspect the reason some folks are surprised when I describe stuff like Duke Nukem 3D as "90s edgy" is because they think of 1990s edgy as being synonymous with 1990 grimdark. While there was certainly a big overlap, the two were not identical. Apart from grimdark edgy, you had:

deliberately gross "underground comix containment breach" edgy (see: Ren & Stimpy and its various imitators, among others);

goofy "cop killing, one-liner quipping, pretty ladies with their tits out and fountains of candy-red blood" edgy (any number of popular video games, including the aforementioned Duke Nukem);

blatant "the creator's barely concealed piss kink" edgy (let's not get into it, but anyone who lived through it knows exactly what I mean);

... and more besides. 1990s edgy was a many-splendoured thing!

Made some progress today. I kinda wish I could play my old save file from when it was on the App Store!

But, still happy to play nonetheless, a small price to pay for snoopy’s street fair. (1/23/23, level 10)

Are You Prepared For Defunctland’s Hour And A Half Long Documentary About A Four Note Musical Jingle?

Part of being prepared is having tissues at the ready. You may need them. It's not as bad as the end of his series on Jim Henson, but it may make you feel things all the same.

"internet historian's alt-right anyways" "great day to have never liked james somerton" "never even heard of illuminaughtii before this lol"

that's great buddy but don't go around thinking you're immune to this. if you're not looking for plagiarism, you likely won't notice it unless its egregiously obvious. hell, you've probably consumed plagiarized content without even realizing it. even hbomb pointed out that these people disguised what they presented pretty well as long as you didn't try and dig deeper. don't come away just thinking of this as a callout piece, take this as an important lesson about vetting your sources. if googling scripts in quotes was enough to expose the original, we should all start doing that shit!!

edit: it got a little too doomer-y a little too fast so one quick addition

this is hbomb's curated playlist of queer creators, many of whom were victims of plagiarism

this is producer kat on reddit calling for any more plagiarism discoveries and for queer content creators to be uplifted

please take some time to uplift these creators and recommend any you know! if you can help uncover more of the original creators whose work was lifted that would be great too :)

UPDATE- From Hbomb's twitter: "We're in the process of cataloguing everyone James Somerton plagiarised and finding their contact information. Which is quite a task, so to help us out: If you see this and happen to be one of the people Somerton stole from, please email us at [email protected]"

edit 2:

Tom Sito Moving Innovation A History Of Computer Animation The MIT Press ( 2013) : Libertar.io : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive