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The RNC sent me a notice of official census material that was actually a fundraiser for the republican candidates running in the midterms. The paperwork was presented as being an official document required to be filled out by law, but it was patently false. This is corruption. This is meant to deceive people into giving data and money to a political party under the guise of nonpartisan census data. This undermines trust in the census, local government, and the democratic process. This is beyond disgusting, and I’m mailing back the form to tell the RNC how I really feel about their bullshit.

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a man of Lebanese/Turkish descent on twitter posted a AI-made reconstruction of the face of Jesus and said he looks like family and he’s so right…

here’s the original tweet btw

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weary and wary are not the same word and have very different meanings and if i see one more person use wearily when they mean warily I’m gonna combust

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The Republican Party just announced that for 2020 they are adopting no platform except “We Unconditionally Support President Trump and Whatever He Does"

This is the wildest fucking shit, like straight up cult-like nonsense, and absolutely unprecedented, but sure, both parties are exactly the same

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どいてくれないネコ https://twitter.com/kyuryuZ/status/1273812918467887104

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people are like "if you put crabs in a bucket they can't escape because they keep pulling each other back in, this is called crab bucket mentality and describes why people don't help each other" and never acknowledge that crabs do not naturally occur in buckets, a human with more power had to put them there

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Jacob Blake’s sister: ‘I’m not sad. I’m not sorry. I’m angry. And I’m tired. I haven’t cried one time. I stopped crying years ago. I am numb. I have been watching police murder people that look like me for years.’

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I love the generational gap between emoji usage. Anyone over 50 sees 🙃 and thinks "silly time! whee 🙃", whereas the rest of us immediately hear, verbatim, "they ask you how you are, and you just have to say that you're fine, when you're not really fine, but you just can't get into it because they would ne--"

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“For some time, Hollywood has marketed family entertainment according to a two-pronged strategy, with cute stuff and kinetic motion for the kids and sly pop-cultural references and tame double entendres for mom and dad. Miyazaki has no interest in such trickery, or in the alternative method, most successfully deployed in Pixar features like Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3 and Inside/Out, of blending silliness with sentimentality.”

“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”

“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”

“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”

“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”

“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”

A.O. Scott and Lauren Wilford on “My Neighbor Totoro”, 2017.  

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Restored film of San Francisco’s Market Street version of a film shot on April 14, 1906, four days before the Great Earthquake, and the attempt to colorize and sharpen the video-converted film.

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as a bunch of new fans are getting into atla via netflix and there’s been a resurgence of fan content (as well as whitewashed fan content), i’m gonna say for artists looking to make fanart of atla:

google images is probably not the best place to pick your references, unless you’re going to be critical about which ones you use. a lot of the images are lightened. i see people defend themselves for whitewashing by showing they used a reference, but that reference was lightened too. 

i’m going to use some pictures of katara i found on google images as examples: 

[id: three images of katara from avatar: the last airbender. each image is a side by side comparison of the coloring of a scene. in the first image, she is from the waist up, smiling and looking at her friends who are off camera. 

the second image is of katara sitting on a staircase, leaning down and putting her face in her left hand. she looks exhausted.

the third image is a closeup of katara’s face, with her looking up at someone off screen. the screenshots on the left of each image are picked from google images and significantly paler than the ones on the right, which were screenshotted directly from the show. end id.]

the ones on google images are paler than the show. this is also a problem i see with gif makers putting filters on katara and sokka. i would not use edited gifs as reference either.

this post is not saying you shouldn’t use google images at all for reference, or that all images found on it are bad. a lot of the katara images on google look just fine! i just wanted to bring awareness that people should not blindly trust their references and instead pick directly from the show if they can. if you do not have netflix or the atla dvds, avatarspirit has had an archive of screenshots from each episode of the show for a long time.  i also advise choosing references that have a similar background and lighting you’re going for. colors will appear differently if you’re using them on red, or blue, or etc. 

this post is not defending or giving excuses to artists who whitewash by saying they just picked bad references. this post is specifically to point out how to AVOID whitewashing by not picking bad references.

this post is also not arguing over if whitewashing is bad or not. if you comment about how whitewashing is not racist, i will delete your reply and/or block you.