#Acceleratrix

[baconmancr]

I'm glad google searches now need 8 paragraphs of explanation from an outside source to be comprehensible

[kerrithjohnson]

Acceleratrix Portrait

5hr 34min

Program: Clip Studio Paint

Brush: Houston Sharp Oil Thick Paint Brush

[galacticheroescomic]

🇨🇦Kerrith of Killustration Studios here!

Here's an homage cover to Adventure Comics #247 which featured the Legion of Superheroes with my Galactic Heroes characters The Broken Commando, H2O, Acceleratrix and Solguard in their place!

I love the Legion of Superheroes and like Superboy inspired them they inspired my characters! :)

#Comics #Art #LegionofSuperHeroes #GalacticHeroes #Superboy #Solguard

[galacticheroescomic]

Who's that Galactic Hero? All of them! 🇨🇦Hi! Kerrith Johnson, of Killustration Studios, Canada here! 📕 Currently creating the Superhero Space Saga: Galactic Heroes! Now available on Tapas and Webtoon! Join the adventures of the Superhero team: the Galactic Heroes! Solguard, H20, Acceleratrix, Glacier and Violet as they blast across the galaxy doing battle against the Dark Lord Rekwin and his empire of Galactic Demons! Current Arc: Light Day! It's the Martian Biker Violet's birthday! Can she save her girlfriend Princess Breanna from the mysterious Tower? 🗺️ My goal is for everybody to see themselves in stories! Links to my other work(original, and fanart) and The Galactic Heroes Comic is on my link tree! https://linktr.ee/KerrithJohnson

[galacticheroescomic]

The Lightspeed Lass, Acceleratrix!

[baconmancr]

Wait, he actually did the McDonald's thing? I honestly had thought it was AI generated or a deep fake

[galacticheroescomic]

Here’s a monthly round-up of my artwork!

Continuing with July!

Secret Invasion, My Adventures with Superman and Galactic Heroes Characters: The Voice, Acceleratrix and a group shot!

Read and Subscribe on Tapas and Webtoon for Galactic Heroes!

[baconmancr]

I agree that the dominant mode of transportation dictates the urban form and thus the population density, but I'm not sure those two are the only possibilities, just the most common ones.

From a quick search, Copenhagen seems to have a population density of about 14000, suggesting the sweet spot for bicycle urbanism is probably between your two extremes.

I think the apex form of golf cart urbanism would also probably lie in the middle, although admittedly that's untested speculation.

Cars are obviously rival with density btw. The 15 minute city people keep advocating for fewer cars bc the existence of maximal car infrastructure makes it hard or unpleasant to walk places and build things for people who walk places. It is not hard to understand this.

[baconmancr]

Why does this dude have Alexandria's Genesis?

[baconmancr]

When reddit made sweeping UI changes, they created old.reddit so you could opt out (and so they could see how many people were opting out).

getting increasingly concerned about tumblr's reliance on A/B testing.

the justification for any number of recent changes from staff has been "We ran the tests! Sure, people are complaining, but that happens all the time; we can clearly see the boost in engagement from [whatever bullshit they tested]"

and like yeah it's basically true that if you change anything about a website you will get people complaining that they hate it, even for changes that will more or less be universally agreed to be positive two months later, so the mere existence of those complaints is not evidence of anything.

and yet. i don't know exactly what tumblr measures when it runs its A/B tests, but I expect whatever it is it gets you a fundamentally incomplete picture of user experience. how much time i spend a day on tumblr (and how many posts i make and reblog and like and so on) is, let's be honest, a lot more driven by what's going on in my life, and by content other people post, than by the interface. I don't know how they measure my engagement, but i really don't think it depends much on UX.

and one answer to that is, well, I'm a captive audience. i've been here for nearly a decade, I met a lot of friends through it, I use the website every day; they don't have to do anything to retain me as a user. they need to get other people using the website more, not make the experience better for me; if i'm here all day and love it or here all day and hate it, they don't care. it's not a pleasant thought, of course, but it makes a sort of business sense

except of course i am not going to be here forever if i hate it! there is some amount of making the experience worse that will eventually convince me to give up and rebuild my social network elsewhere, and every time they pull this sort of shit they invisibly burn some amount of goodwill with long term users in return for slightly better engagement numbers with new ones, and at some point you burn more than you have and the site collapses

I don't expect this to sway tumblr; frankly, the subtext of every change tumblr does is that the site is unprofitable, they're running out of patience for it to become profitable, and the default outcome is it collapses. 'keep things going as usual so you don't alienate your existing userbase' is not an option when 'things as usual' means the website dies.

but it sure looks like on the way to dying the website will also steadily get worse and worse.

[baconmancr]

Even if it stands, people will figure out the bare minimum they need to do to make it copyrightable, do that, and then never release the originals. Is manually applying a color correction filter enough, do you think?

So the AI art industry might be done before it had a chance to get started.

In other news, PETA might have accidentally done something good, for once.

[baconmancr]

I think an inability to maintain coherent worlds is a symptom of everything being a sequel or spin-off. New teams are constantly being handed established worlds and told that to tell a story, this is the framework they must do it in. That naturally leads to ideas being shoehorned in regardless of existing canon, because the writers see canon as shackles constraining them.

The other issue is that these are being made by teams, which tends to homogenize any output. And the IP owners prefer it that way, because they don't want any single person to be synonymous with their property. Everyone is a replaceable cog in the machine.

I did in fact watch Rings of Power, and its hard actually to criticize it in relation to how much of the discourse around it is just nonsense, eight levels of windmill-tilting meta critiques that makes the show itself difficult to glimpse. And as a show on its own terms, if you watched it as someone with maybe a passing familiarity with the Peter Jackson films and that it is it, its first episode is pretty decent. Some dings on the worldbuilding and a little bit too committed to the modern “multiple disparate story arcs that will weave together in the finale” formula, but nothing major.

I, however, I am not someone with just a passing familiarity; I am in fact an insufferable LOTR hipster who will tell you that The Silmarillion is better than the Lord of The Rings, for example. Though… Christopher Tolkien’s decision to excise the disparate narrators of Rúmil and Pengolodh of the texts extant in JRR Tolkien’s notes was a mistake as it marries together what were intended to be separate stories with their own tones and authorial biases surrounding a unifying historical event without revealing to the reader that reality, resulting in tonal jumps and uneven transitions, and that the Silmarillion is really a publishing artifact anyway, necessary to condense the story of Arda into a printable page count but a constraint its success liberated us from by paving the way for the publication of the Histories of Middle Earth, which in all of their contradictory fragmentation more perfectly embody the story-as-history the tale of Arda is meant to be. So maybe it would be inaccurate to say that The Silmarillion is ‘better’ but more that it-

Anyway, I can’t come into Rings of Power with fresh eyes. And while you do need to give charity, things will need to be simplified and new details imagined, in the end the product I want is some form of adaptation. What has really baffled me, in the modern era especially but honestly its a trend with a long history, are the completely unnecessary changes to the source material that one episode in are already polluting the work.

Galadriel is one of the best characters in Middle Earth, pretty sure that is objective. And one of the reasons she is the best character is how her motivations stand out from the crowd. She is actually mentioned by name during the Oath of Feanor in the Silmarillion, a cause which she joins for her own motives:

But Galadriel, the only woman of the Noldor to stand that day tall and valiant amoung the contending pinces, was eager to be gone. No oaths she swore, but the words of Feanor concerning Middle-earth had kindled in her heart, for she yearned to see the wide unguarded lands and to rule there a realm at her own will

Galadriel’s ambition to rule and master a land where she can build her own destiny is a great motive - its not evil, she is a great ruler, but embedded in it are seeds that could result in evil. Its how the One Ring tempts her in Lothlorien, as that desire for dominance was always inside her. And rulership is also so…personal & complex, it can be expressed it so many ways.

So why does Rings of Power literally delete her character and replace it with this revenge bot? Its so *boring*, oh your brother died - who by the way, in the text *literally got better*, reincarnated by Mandos due to his noble deeds and is chillin in Valinor, also Galadriel had 4 brothers but never mind they don’t matter I guess - so now you want revenge. Sounds like a character with a binary motivation that I have seen a thousand times before! And one that doesn’t  connect with the one expressed in The Lord of the Rings films you are so slavishly attempting to cash in on via association.

The why is important here, because you do have to make changes, I understand that, but here its wholly unnecessary. Ambitious!Galadriel is canonically the character who scouts out the movements of Sauron! Her desire to cultivate Middle Earth and protect her kin give her plenty of motivation to do so. You aren’t telling a new story that necessitates this change, you are telling the *same story*, just worse, for no reason. The ‘why’ therefore comes from the fact that authentic adaptation just isn’t a value writers rooms hold anymore, instead inventing the story in isolation from the context and retrofitting the adaptational elements on afterwards. Which sucks.

The same problem rears its head with the idea of a trip to Valinor as a “reward” a chosen few can be granted as an honor. After the defeat of Morgoth the Noldor are, with a few exceptions, pardoned, and the elves can sail to Valinor at any time. You need a good boat but they have those, its not a particularly difficult journey, and in this time period elves are doing it of their own volition all the time. So why don’t people like Celebrimbor and Galadriel not go back? Setting aside some textual debate about Galadriel’s pardon, its primarily because they don’t want to, the ambitions and independence and all that. The show entirely rewrites how Valinor works, and Galadriel’s character, in order to deliver…the same exact conflict the books already have! Elves being torn between staying in Middle Earth & returning to Aman is one of the primary conflicts of the Second Age.

Also why does sailing into the West in the show look like you pass through a light teleporter? Are you implying the sea is sundered and Aman is in a different plane? Because that happens ~2000 years later than when your show is set, Amazon. Right now Aman is just *there*, its a normal continent not surrounded by a halo of light. Literally anyone *can* sail there, they just aren’t allowed to land if they aren’t elves. 

So Maiar are generally immortal, you know? And Sauron wasn’t personally destroyed during the War of Wrath - he surrendered to the Valar, they requested he return to Valinor to face judgement, and then he fled. Literally no one thinks he is dead, or gone, or honestly that he hasn’t been up to shit, they would have no reason to. They just can’t find him and don’t know his capabilities. Which, again, is the story you want to tell - why have the elves look like idiots? Can’t they just not be able to find him, and *therefore* they want to reduce their patrols and declare peace, while wiser, headstrong, ambitious Galadriel knows there is a greater threat lurking? Why flip around the whole premise to wind up with something so close to the source materially anyway?

I can forgive stuff like pretending the Elves fought Morgoth because he was ‘evil’, like its really dumb, the Silmarils are such a big deal the entire history of the First Age is named after them, but they aren’t relevant to this story, I get that. You wanted to simplify, its understandable. But these changes…if you know the source material, you made it *more complex* for me. I couldn’t even tell what year this story took place in at first! Galadriel bent on revenge? If this is 1200 SA shouldn’t she be in Lothlorien by now? They think Sauron is *dead*? Is this…after the Last Alliance? That can’t be right of course, Eregion is here and there are no rings yet. I don’t know what knowledge I can trust now, which is weird! You gained nothing for making your audience pay that price.

Its hard not to think of other big fantasy media projects like Star Wars in regards to this, in that something in media production is just harshly destroying attempts to maintain internal consistency and cohesiveness when it comes to these world-building heavy stories. I still don’t quite understand it, and I think Rings of Power will hopefully be another glimpse into the machine in that regard.

But its the first episode, maybe I will be wrong, who knows, lets find out next week.

[baconmancr]

Not that the rent isn’t too damn high, but NYC wan’t a nice place to live in the 80s

[baconmancr]

I wish tumblr didn't censor you from the notes for citing your sources, this is a good overview.

ChatGPT seems incapable of answering questions with answers that can be discovered online, but have not been explicitly written out online.

Of the 15 movies it gave me in response to these three questions, only one of them is considered to be a pre-"Cannibal Holocaust" predecessor to found footage horror. There's lots of valid-yet-obscure answers that it missed

[baconmancr]

I literally wish being a conservative was as stigmatized as conservatives think it is