![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
if there were two faces on a guy and one looked in the opposite direction would that be fucked up or
Pros of Dreamwidth’s Reading page being available logged out: goodbye, need to compulsively check my “dashboard” every single waking moment of my life!
Cons of Dreamwidth’s Reading page being available logged out: goodbye, need to log in at all, except maybe once a week when the Post Idea hits!
Anyway, that sure was a month that happened. Because I am probably inevitably going to freak out later over “wasting” my entire break, here’s some stuff I’ve been up to, in no particular order \o/
cmd jekyll and mr code
Even before this whole tumblr purge/exodus thing got big, I’ve been thinking of making my own website. Not even a super professional portfolio, necessarily, just a way for me to throw content at the void and have complete control over how it’s displayed. (Spoiler alert: I hate like 90% of social media platform layouts, both usermade and default.) Also because the more I mess around with art and code, the more they overlap. Tumblr’s custom pages were (are?) the easiest way to do that short of, well, a custom site. But fuck tumblr etc.
At some point around the whole blog backup frenzy, I discovered GitHub Pages with Jekyll. This is pretty much exactly what I’ve been looking for, with a catch: I know jack shit about the command line and all the techy stuff both Git and Jekyll entail.
I still don’t know jack shit, really. I tried backing up my blogs with Jekyll and it kept spitting up errors. Jekyll code parameters confuse the heck out of me, and I can’t seem to find a beginner-friendly tutorial like the one that got me into theme and by extension site coding in the first place. (Side note: holy shit, that’s still up?!)
But as of last night, with new weekly deadlines not-quite-looming-but-still-very-much-lingering, I sat myself down and did the thing.
It looks like crap! But it’s up. It’s running. The content actually changes fluidly as the tutorial (see first link) promises! Progress!!
Also, Ratio is a pretty cool typeface, in my student wannabe-type-nerd opinion. I’m not at the level where I can recognize type from a quick look (yet), but I did zoom in on Ratio’s non-Light/Thin/Display fonts and nerd out a little over the angled stroke. (It’s most prominent at larger sizes and with lowercase i and j, by the way, and why it’s missing from the Display variations is beyond me.)
Anyway, TL;DR: website is an actual thing that happened. Kinda. Heck if I know when I’m gonna work on it more, especially now that my coursework involves work for Actual ClientsTM, but it sure does exist!
/*imagine how is hear the code*/
Other stray coding adventures from the month: I resent Flight Rising’s lack of mobile compatibility a lot, so I now have a mockup ripoff layout. In theory this will be nice for lore and whatever the heck else I want to write that won’t fit nicely in FR’s default boxes. (Tiny clan profiles, anyone?)
That link is probably going to break when I get back to messing with it and I’m too lazy to make an archived version, but ya know. ~it’s responsive~
A link that probably won’t break is the the character playlist page I coded for a friend’s webcomic a while back. While not technically part of this month’s coding shenanigans, I was trying to make a similar thing but without the YouTube thumbnails. Would link [insert Timmy Turner’s dad meme] if I had anything to show for it >:V
Instead, somehow that turned into putting a Toyota Corolla craigslist ad on repeat for at least half an hour.
and now for actual music
As for why I was back on the playlist thing in the first place, it’s because, despite everything, character playlists are heckin fun. In my search for fitting tunesthat I’ll actually listen to more than once or twice, I binged pretty much everything by Mother Mother. I’d heard a few of their songs before, and man, I was not disappointed by the rest.
Sometimes when binging an artist/group I’ll start to feel like everything they make sounds the same (which I am not good enough at audio words to describe better). Having said that, while the lead singer(s) of Mother Mother have a distinctive voice, I never found myself getting sick of hearing it. (For what it’s worth, got a similar impression of Marina and the Diamonds and Bastille, as my outdated character song docs can attest to.)
I also found it interesting how their albums almost form a sort of character arc, if you squint? Or maybe that’s just me shoehorning a narrative into album themes. A constant topic of their music is ~mental hell~, which sorta culminates in The Sticks, a great album for when you just wanna ditch society and go live as a hermit on a hill, and Very Good Bad Thing, which is a GOLDMINE for dysfunctional relationship songs (particularly romantic, as most music does, but I guess if you squint it’d work for other kinds…? wasn’t really thinking in other contexts).
Something changes in No Culture. I can’t give too much info on that because I listened to it sleep-deprived and didn’t really register half, but I definitely remember reading the lyrics and thinking, “huh, that’s new.” Then we get to Dance and Cry, which is chock full of tunes for when you’re trying your best and you… sometimes succeed? sometimes not. It leaves off on a fairly dismal note, but at least it’s “I keep trying and failing” and not “fuck trying, time to die.”
also “It’s Alright” just. WRECKS MY ENTIRE SELF. sure it’s about as on-the-nose as it gets but IT IS SO GOOD AND THEMATICALLY RESONANT TO MY INTERESTS. FUCK
music to my ears, art to my… eyes…?
A majority of my creative efforts this month have gone towards a (technically*) Shiny New Original Project. It’s been fun! I refuse to say shit about it in public, besides a teased fullbody lineup (which I’m not linking because I have half a mind to store it) and mentioning that it exists! If we’re familiar and you’re interested, I’m not opposed to a private infodump, but here’s what I can say:
I mentioned in my OC rambledump post that I’d be cool with people not even knowing what my characters look like. At the same time, if I’m not writing actual prose, then people will know what my characters look like, to some extent or another! Character design is a vital part of visual storytelling!
There are way too many assorted YouTube video essays for me to link on this particular subject, but a couple recent examples I was struck by: the oufit design in Get Out, which uses outfit colors to subtly reinforce the story’s themes including how much the protagonist contrasts with his environment, and Now You See It’s observations on stripes and costumes in film. I never noticed any of this in live action before and now I’m seeing it everywhere. It’s great!
And of course, it doesn’t stop with live action. Color-coded characters are hardly new to fiction. But I want to go deeper: how does art style influence tone, beyond the simplified “cartoony is simple/funny, realism isn’t”?
I noticed when doing my annual art roundup that I have drawn a crudton of “characters posing in the void without context.” This is a fairly common thing among the less background-inclined among us. “Practice scenery” is an ongoing Thing To Draw. But frankly, I’m not gonna stop drawing people in a void any time soon, so why not get even more experimental with it?
This is where I would insert an image demonstrating my point, except I haven’t drawn it. For now, think Scott McCloud’s pyramid of art styles meets unsourced thoughts on webcomics as a medium meets, uh. Homestuck meta.
I Do Solemnly Swear This is Not Nepotism
While stalking my friends’ twitter accounts, as I do, I came upon these tweets (short thread), quoted below:
hi Joy
Needless to say, this and a twitter search for SamFateKeeper’s use of words like “animation” and “style” added fuel to my art musing fire, and also took me to these great articles. I haven’t archive binged Storming the Ivory Tower yet, but from what I have read, they’re quality analyseseven if I scream at the tiny, not-entirely-fitting typeface a bit. While Homestuck is a general topic, posts range from (in order of those three links) the nature of hypercomics, technological limitations and their impact on web-based media, and that one shitpost anime. Hell, looking at the site again, I found another article to read after I dump this text wall.
At one point an article mentions interactive fiction, which through a tangential rabbit hole took me to the short story/game “Bogeyman.” And oh lord. That was a ride. Heed the warnings and dive right in—you’re in for a haunting little treat. Also note that the music changes each chapter—I found myself muting most after a while, except the last one because I am an eternal sucker for piano.
After a little digging, I found that it was written to have the most impact on a first read, which checked out when comparing my playthrough(?? what terms do you use for this) to a friend’s & trying for a different end myself. (Spoiler alert: I died :D) Caught some foreshadowing and stuff I initially thought would be followed up on but, at least from the routes I know, wasn’t. Nonetheless, a great read, and now I gotta go mess with twine. For Reasons.
miscellaneous notes that wouldn’t fit anywhere else
On the topic of interactive fiction, I watched/played Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch” courtesy friend + rabbit stream. It was… a time! I had more thoughts on it in the immediate aftermath but suffice it to say, I’m not impressed by “you thought you had a choice but OH SHIT YOU’RE DOOMED ha ha ha we are so clever” narratives. Also, I got stuck in a Netflix time loop, which was great.
uhhhh let’s see… flipped out about death of the author for a good few days! It prompted that character post I already linked a couple times. Not much to say beyond that.
Watched the entirety of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared after years of staying away from it in case it legitimately freaked me out, because I’m a weenie like that. Boy, that series sure happened, didn’t it! I’m sure people have done deep analyses on the meaning and school and society and the like, but I’m pretty satisfied with… whatever the experience was.
Sorta-binged the first season of Mob Psycho 100 which was cool! I’m not chomping at the bit for the second season’s dramatics, but it sounds like they don’t disappoint, so I’ll probably give it a watch when the dub comes out. (Nothing against subtitles but the back-and-forth viewing experience is… subpar.)
Also tried to watch Kaiji because it’s anime month or something. It was all right and I can see how it’s a more compelling gambling anime than a certain other shitshow I watched in full a few months back, but the narration absolutely killed me and I’m not planning to watch past the third episode.
The narration is also pretty blatant in Kakegurui, but I’m somehow not as annoyed? Probably because it comes from the characters and mostly makes sense in context, even if I would’ve preferred not having the schemes monologued. Except they have to be, because they’re bullshit. They Are BullShit. But fuck me, it’s expressive bullshit.
If I read any more analyses by this lovely tumblr user and break my informal “don’t get into things that aren’t finished” rule for this fanservicey “fuck logic, it is fun nonsense and you are gonna turn your brain off and LIKE IT” series, you are formally invited to chuck me off a building.IT ALREADY HAPPENED LAST YEAR I CAN’T DO THIS AGAIN
…On a less anime note, I’ve reread Locke and Key at least a couple times now, and I still love it. Now there’s a series I can justify getting into—except there is still no discernible fanbase and that makes me sad.
Also, the semester started, and it’s not as hellish as I thought it’d be (so far)! Partially because I’ve actually managed to not put things off until the night before they’re due (so far)! I am probably going to eat this entire paragraph later on but I just wanna mention that while I can!!
in conclusion:
Fuck yeah, I did shit last month. I plan to keep doing shit this month. I don’t know if these monthly roundup things are going to become regular, but it honestly wouldn’t be bad, both as an all-purpose linkrec and because I am slowly crawling out of the mindset that doing anything that isn’t school is a waste of time.
Having said that, I’m procrastinating by writing this. As always, fuck editing. Tune in next time for -throws dart- more unsolicited media thoughts, personal infodumping, and/or whatever the flying heck I use Dreamwidth for!
Cons of Dreamwidth’s Reading page being available logged out: goodbye, need to log in at all, except maybe once a week when the Post Idea hits!
Anyway, that sure was a month that happened. Because I am probably inevitably going to freak out later over “wasting” my entire break, here’s some stuff I’ve been up to, in no particular order \o/
cmd jekyll and mr code
Even before this whole tumblr purge/exodus thing got big, I’ve been thinking of making my own website. Not even a super professional portfolio, necessarily, just a way for me to throw content at the void and have complete control over how it’s displayed. (Spoiler alert: I hate like 90% of social media platform layouts, both usermade and default.) Also because the more I mess around with art and code, the more they overlap. Tumblr’s custom pages were (are?) the easiest way to do that short of, well, a custom site. But fuck tumblr etc.
At some point around the whole blog backup frenzy, I discovered GitHub Pages with Jekyll. This is pretty much exactly what I’ve been looking for, with a catch: I know jack shit about the command line and all the techy stuff both Git and Jekyll entail.
I still don’t know jack shit, really. I tried backing up my blogs with Jekyll and it kept spitting up errors. Jekyll code parameters confuse the heck out of me, and I can’t seem to find a beginner-friendly tutorial like the one that got me into theme and by extension site coding in the first place. (Side note: holy shit, that’s still up?!)
But as of last night, with new weekly deadlines not-quite-looming-but-still-very-much-lingering, I sat myself down and did the thing.
It looks like crap! But it’s up. It’s running. The content actually changes fluidly as the tutorial (see first link) promises! Progress!!
Also, Ratio is a pretty cool typeface, in my student wannabe-type-nerd opinion. I’m not at the level where I can recognize type from a quick look (yet), but I did zoom in on Ratio’s non-Light/Thin/Display fonts and nerd out a little over the angled stroke. (It’s most prominent at larger sizes and with lowercase i and j, by the way, and why it’s missing from the Display variations is beyond me.)
Anyway, TL;DR: website is an actual thing that happened. Kinda. Heck if I know when I’m gonna work on it more, especially now that my coursework involves work for Actual ClientsTM, but it sure does exist!
/*imagine how is hear the code*/
Other stray coding adventures from the month: I resent Flight Rising’s lack of mobile compatibility a lot, so I now have a mockup ripoff layout. In theory this will be nice for lore and whatever the heck else I want to write that won’t fit nicely in FR’s default boxes. (Tiny clan profiles, anyone?)
That link is probably going to break when I get back to messing with it and I’m too lazy to make an archived version, but ya know. ~it’s responsive~
A link that probably won’t break is the the character playlist page I coded for a friend’s webcomic a while back. While not technically part of this month’s coding shenanigans, I was trying to make a similar thing but without the YouTube thumbnails. Would link [insert Timmy Turner’s dad meme] if I had anything to show for it >:V
Instead, somehow that turned into putting a Toyota Corolla craigslist ad on repeat for at least half an hour.
and now for actual music
As for why I was back on the playlist thing in the first place, it’s because, despite everything, character playlists are heckin fun. In my search for fitting tunes
Sometimes when binging an artist/group I’ll start to feel like everything they make sounds the same (which I am not good enough at audio words to describe better). Having said that, while the lead singer(s) of Mother Mother have a distinctive voice, I never found myself getting sick of hearing it. (For what it’s worth, got a similar impression of Marina and the Diamonds and Bastille, as my outdated character song docs can attest to.)
I also found it interesting how their albums almost form a sort of character arc, if you squint? Or maybe that’s just me shoehorning a narrative into album themes. A constant topic of their music is ~mental hell~, which sorta culminates in The Sticks, a great album for when you just wanna ditch society and go live as a hermit on a hill, and Very Good Bad Thing, which is a GOLDMINE for dysfunctional relationship songs (particularly romantic, as most music does, but I guess if you squint it’d work for other kinds…? wasn’t really thinking in other contexts).
Something changes in No Culture. I can’t give too much info on that because I listened to it sleep-deprived and didn’t really register half, but I definitely remember reading the lyrics and thinking, “huh, that’s new.” Then we get to Dance and Cry, which is chock full of tunes for when you’re trying your best and you… sometimes succeed? sometimes not. It leaves off on a fairly dismal note, but at least it’s “I keep trying and failing” and not “fuck trying, time to die.”
also “It’s Alright” just. WRECKS MY ENTIRE SELF. sure it’s about as on-the-nose as it gets but IT IS SO GOOD AND THEMATICALLY RESONANT TO MY INTERESTS. FUCK
music to my ears, art to my… eyes…?
A majority of my creative efforts this month have gone towards a (technically*) Shiny New Original Project. It’s been fun! I refuse to say shit about it in public, besides a teased fullbody lineup (which I’m not linking because I have half a mind to store it) and mentioning that it exists! If we’re familiar and you’re interested, I’m not opposed to a private infodump, but here’s what I can say:
- *It is, like basically every other creative project in which I’ve invested significant thought, an AU. Was an AU. These keep deviating so far from the source material I eventually say (or want to say) “fuck it, 100% my city now,” and this time around I’m doing it from the getgo. (…As far as “after months of on-and-off stray thoughts and vaguely coherent scene progressions” can be considered a “getgo.” How’s the last week of December relative to uhh… more or less since April?)
- It has seriously gotten me thinking about art style in visual media.
I mentioned in my OC rambledump post that I’d be cool with people not even knowing what my characters look like. At the same time, if I’m not writing actual prose, then people will know what my characters look like, to some extent or another! Character design is a vital part of visual storytelling!
There are way too many assorted YouTube video essays for me to link on this particular subject, but a couple recent examples I was struck by: the oufit design in Get Out, which uses outfit colors to subtly reinforce the story’s themes including how much the protagonist contrasts with his environment, and Now You See It’s observations on stripes and costumes in film. I never noticed any of this in live action before and now I’m seeing it everywhere. It’s great!
And of course, it doesn’t stop with live action. Color-coded characters are hardly new to fiction. But I want to go deeper: how does art style influence tone, beyond the simplified “cartoony is simple/funny, realism isn’t”?
I noticed when doing my annual art roundup that I have drawn a crudton of “characters posing in the void without context.” This is a fairly common thing among the less background-inclined among us. “Practice scenery” is an ongoing Thing To Draw. But frankly, I’m not gonna stop drawing people in a void any time soon, so why not get even more experimental with it?
This is where I would insert an image demonstrating my point, except I haven’t drawn it. For now, think Scott McCloud’s pyramid of art styles meets unsourced thoughts on webcomics as a medium meets, uh. Homestuck meta.
I Do Solemnly Swear This is Not Nepotism
While stalking my friends’ twitter accounts, as I do, I came upon these tweets (short thread), quoted below:
fuck I should really write about visual rhetoric and style carrying meaning more often shouldn't I?
bluh bluh
-
like Homestuck's sprite art is essential to its central joke--that everything is a big buggy videogame played by dumbasses. to change the style is to undermine the core gag. Kirby meanwhile I just think was, like many contemporaries, interested in what comics could look like
-
Revolutionary Girl Utena is extremely flat and plays a lot with the idea of shadow puppetry and theater--the visual flatness of the world emphasizes its moral flatness, the way Ohtori is this place of arrested adolescence. &c.
style carries meaning, basically
@SamFateKeeper, 25 Nov 2018
Needless to say, this and a twitter search for SamFateKeeper’s use of words like “animation” and “style” added fuel to my art musing fire, and also took me to these great articles. I haven’t archive binged Storming the Ivory Tower yet, but from what I have read, they’re quality analyses
At one point an article mentions interactive fiction, which through a tangential rabbit hole took me to the short story/game “Bogeyman.” And oh lord. That was a ride. Heed the warnings and dive right in—you’re in for a haunting little treat. Also note that the music changes each chapter—I found myself muting most after a while, except the last one because I am an eternal sucker for piano.
After a little digging, I found that it was written to have the most impact on a first read, which checked out when comparing my playthrough(?? what terms do you use for this) to a friend’s & trying for a different end myself. (Spoiler alert: I died :D) Caught some foreshadowing and stuff I initially thought would be followed up on but, at least from the routes I know, wasn’t. Nonetheless, a great read, and now I gotta go mess with twine. For Reasons.
miscellaneous notes that wouldn’t fit anywhere else
On the topic of interactive fiction, I watched/played Black Mirror’s “Bandersnatch” courtesy friend + rabbit stream. It was… a time! I had more thoughts on it in the immediate aftermath but suffice it to say, I’m not impressed by “you thought you had a choice but OH SHIT YOU’RE DOOMED ha ha ha we are so clever” narratives. Also, I got stuck in a Netflix time loop, which was great.
uhhhh let’s see… flipped out about death of the author for a good few days! It prompted that character post I already linked a couple times. Not much to say beyond that.
Watched the entirety of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared after years of staying away from it in case it legitimately freaked me out, because I’m a weenie like that. Boy, that series sure happened, didn’t it! I’m sure people have done deep analyses on the meaning and school and society and the like, but I’m pretty satisfied with… whatever the experience was.
Sorta-binged the first season of Mob Psycho 100 which was cool! I’m not chomping at the bit for the second season’s dramatics, but it sounds like they don’t disappoint, so I’ll probably give it a watch when the dub comes out. (Nothing against subtitles but the back-and-forth viewing experience is… subpar.)
Also tried to watch Kaiji because it’s anime month or something. It was all right and I can see how it’s a more compelling gambling anime than a certain other shitshow I watched in full a few months back, but the narration absolutely killed me and I’m not planning to watch past the third episode.
The narration is also pretty blatant in Kakegurui, but I’m somehow not as annoyed? Probably because it comes from the characters and mostly makes sense in context, even if I would’ve preferred not having the schemes monologued. Except they have to be, because they’re bullshit. They Are BullShit. But fuck me, it’s expressive bullshit.
If I read any more analyses by this lovely tumblr user and break my informal “don’t get into things that aren’t finished” rule for this fanservicey “fuck logic, it is fun nonsense and you are gonna turn your brain off and LIKE IT” series, you are formally invited to chuck me off a building.
…On a less anime note, I’ve reread Locke and Key at least a couple times now, and I still love it. Now there’s a series I can justify getting into—except there is still no discernible fanbase and that makes me sad.
Also, the semester started, and it’s not as hellish as I thought it’d be (so far)! Partially because I’ve actually managed to not put things off until the night before they’re due (so far)! I am probably going to eat this entire paragraph later on but I just wanna mention that while I can!!
in conclusion:
Fuck yeah, I did shit last month. I plan to keep doing shit this month. I don’t know if these monthly roundup things are going to become regular, but it honestly wouldn’t be bad, both as an all-purpose linkrec and because I am slowly crawling out of the mindset that doing anything that isn’t school is a waste of time.
Having said that, I’m procrastinating by writing this. As always, fuck editing. Tune in next time for -throws dart- more unsolicited media thoughts, personal infodumping, and/or whatever the flying heck I use Dreamwidth for!
no subject
no subject
extremely belatedhi, Joy! how goes things? noticed you got back on tumblr; what prompted that decision, if I may ask? :ono subject
Secondary reason: Twitter *sucks*. I assumed that... you know, the more popular social media platform would be better, but a) the user interface is very much not ideal, and b) even the best user interface would not compensate for the fact that Twitter, because it only allows little snippets of words, is fundamentally bad for the exchange of ideas. Even tweet threads are bad, because individual tweets can be shared and responded to out of context.
Basically, I didn't realize how good Tumblr was until I left :P
This time around, though, I'm trying to treat my Tumblr as a "blog" in the traditional sense. I'm not really using it a vehicle for fandom, and I'm not reblogging other people's posts without commentary unless they're particularly topical. gaytog dot tumblr dot com is official just a place for me to write words. And I like it better that way.
Anyway, that's me. How's it going with you?
no subject
Aside from that, though, glad to hear the gaytog-as-personal-blog (like ye olde pre-reblog days, from what I gather) setup is working for you!
Uh, oh my end, I’ve pretty much been an internet hermit except for occasional DMs, but ngl I kinda like it that way? This place exists for occasional longform thoughts, and as noted(? if not here then another entry maybe, too lazy to check) I haven’t really felt the need to post art lately because it’s been largely related to [project details redacted].
I also have half a mind to finish backing up my blog for good and then deleting it, if the tumblr sale follows through, especially if this part of the rumor comes to pass, but that’s besides the point.It’s a heck of a lot slower than the tumblr activity days, and sure I could curate my dash better and everything, but I’m pretty satisfied being 90% lurker again :yno subject
Anyway, internet hermitage is extremely valid! Excited to see what [project details redacted] refers to.
And in answer to your question... 2011. That is how long I've been on Tumblr. Almost eight years now.
no subject
WELP seeing as it’s been a few weeks and (as far as I’m aware) all talk of tumblr buyers has died out for the time being, seems like you’re safe! Also extremely valid to get the blue hellsite to be less of a hellsite for you after almost eight years holy wow.
I make no promises for public [project redacted] updates any time soon, but if you’d like I can toss you a preview or two when available? No promises on the timeframe of that either, granted, but ya know. Offer’s on the table ;V