#I am a complete failure

[missiodine]

I fucking hate myself.

[inkskinned]

the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.

capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.

now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.

and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.

and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.

and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".

it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"

[caligvlasaqvarivm]

Okay challenge mode. You are a therapist and Eridan Ampora from Homestuck has just walked right out of his intro page into your office. How do you fix him?

put him and karkat in a room with a pile of stuff and tell them they can't leave until they've jumped into it and talked about their feelings

[uniiiquehecrt]

Voice actors are NOT the same as actors.

It takes a specific kind of skill-set and training to be able to warp and meld the voice. It takes a certain kind of talent and dedication to hone that talent into the ability to meld the voice and invoke emotion with one's voice alone. Actors are used to using their voice secondarily to their body language and their facial expressions. It's all mirrored back on camera. They do have nuance. But it's a different kind of nuance and a different kind of training to produce that nuance.

Voice actors might get their likeness transposed on their character's design, and maybe their mannerisms might seep into the character's animation. But when it's all said and done: their presence is in their voice. They are bringing a character to life, showing that emotion in their voice, trying to keep a specific accent, drawl, pitch, tone in that voice and keep it consistent for their recording sessions.

The voice actor is like a classically trained musician who can play first chair in a competitive, world-renown orchestra. The actor (who fills the voice actor's role) is like a moot who played violin in beginner and intermediate high school orchestra and thinks they can get into Juilliard with that 2-4 years of experience.

This doesn't mean that the HS orchestra moot can't play. They can even be really good at it. Maybe they won competitions and sat first chair. But they are not in the same league as the person who's been training their whole lives and lives and breathes to hone their craft using the instrument and all of the training they've ever acquired to perfect it. They are not meant for the same roles. They are not in the same caliber. You do not hire the HS equivalent when you want to play complex music in a competitive orchestra.

Actors are not the same as voice actors.

And furthermore, actors - especially big name actors - taking the roles of animated characters for big budget films or TV pilots makes no sense anyways when - at least in the case of TV pilots - there's not a point to hiring a big budget actors anyways. That money could be used elsewhere (like paying your animators), and the talent that is brought onto the screen for X character could then be hired on to voice said character no recasting required.

I wouldn't say voice acting as a profession is in danger exactly, but it's certainly being disrespected and overlooked for celebrity clout, and this has ALWAYS been an issue. Shoot, even Robin Williams knew that much - which is why he tried so hard not to be used as a marketing chess piece for Aladdin and got royally pissed off when it happened anyways. People shouldn't go to any movie (but especially not animated films) because "oh famous actor is in it". People should go because it's a good movie and the voice acting is good.

People who honest to god think that voice actors are replaceable because "oh well anyone can voice act" or "I like xyz celebrity so naturally it'll be good" ... Honestly I just wish you'd reassess your priorities because you're missing the point and are part of the problem.

Voice Actors ≠ Actors.

[mitskijamie]

so crazy how jamie had a breakdown and quit his job and basically blew up his career to go be a slut on national tv (which made him miserable) 😭 and then he was like uhhh what do i do and went to his ex for advice 😭 oh baby i felt so bad for him even though he was a huge prick he got knocked down so many pegs and tbh i wish they explored that more like how bad must it have been to go back to his dad after getting some freedom from him to the point that he almost ruined his career

God I knowwww. I joke but I really think a lot about how LCA was actually such a dark time in Jamie’s life

Like. The real reason he left Man City was that he couldn’t tolerate the abuse anymore. He tells Ted that. He had a few months (presumably) at Richmond where he wasn’t being (physically) abused for the first time since childhood, and even in that short period of time, his life changed so much. Like by Two Aces he had already started confronting his trauma and learning from Ted and opening up and kind of sort of getting close to actually making friends and then he just. Woke up one morning and had it yanked out from under him. Just had to go back to his house of horrors in Manchester like nothing had happened

And obviously he tried to reacclimate and go back to what he was used to and just forget everything but it’s like. Growing up in a cage is one thing but being caged after you’ve been free is fucking torture. Obviously he was going to jump at the first chance he had to get the fuck out of there and set out on his own

And THEN he got kicked off LCA and City wouldn’t take him back and he had no one. Literally no one. For the first time in his life he didn’t have teammates and he didn’t have a coach and his relationship with Georgie was in a weird place and he didn’t make friends at Richmond because he was an asshole to everyone and he didn’t have friends at City (sat alone and sad on the bus) and Keeley had left him because he was an asshole to her and James would never take him back so like. He had no one to turn to and no prospects and his career was over it and it was entirely his fault and there was nothing he could do to fix it and so he just went to Keeley as a last ditch effort

[blorb-el]

finally got around to watching the 2018/19 death of superman and reign of the supermen movies and i did laugh out loud at this one moment

[goldkirk]

I DON'T HAVE TO LIE ANYMORE!

[blushy-tigerrr]

vent in tags sorry

cw: mention of loss

[skyloftian-nutcase]

Giving myself a spa day and washing my hair while thinking about what would happen if totk Ganondorf actually won is a strange way to relax but ok brain. You do you.

[baejax-the-great]

Broken Oaths Achilles is so funny because he starts the story thinking like, I'm going to look my hottest and least bothered and show him what he's been missing and how much I don't care and then he experiences the strongest whiplash of his life in finding Pat is both hot and supremely bothered in that he's fucking traumatized and regardless of how that came to be, it's Achilles' fault and thus his responsibility to fix it and he has literally no idea how to do that

[rosencrantzsguildenstern]

i am not very good at rhythm games

[llycaons]

WHEW I just got out of my eval and they promoted meeee. I was like 'I took a long time to figure out how to do this job' and my manager was actually very fair she was like 'well you were brand new to the field itself and to this unit which was still being developed and was so different from what you trained in, and we really expected the senior staff to take the lead and support you but they didn't' (it's because they were being horribly overworked and had no consistent schedule so theywere all burnt-out then quit) 'so you should give yourself some credit for trucking it out' so it's nice to think that my refusal to simply quit last year and my many hours of anxiety and suffering led to a sense of confidence and stability. and more money lmao

[sparkle-fiend]

I really wish I was a faster artist 😩 There’s soooo much stuff I want to do and not enough time, or prompts and things that pop up that I’m not fast enough to get to. (pictured below: my inspiration vs my drawing speed)

[coachbeards]

good morning. Controversial moment when i say beard should’ve yelled at ted more

[poughkeepsies]

gonna be honest there's actually been so many times when I feel like giving in to my instincts and stomping my foot and crying about how I don't want to do my work and the ghost of christopher diaz appears to me going "I complained once but it didn't work [so I] just kept on swimming" and suddenly I'm like fuck i guess you're right

[nachosncheezies]

Something that I have observed, in life and in fandom spaces, is that vast cultural and linguistic differences are often unknown, and this has become especially apparent as social usage of the internet has grown worldwide. It's no one's fault. Nobody is "less than" or unintelligent or whatever else for not recognizing it. It's simply something that you can't really know, I think, without being directly exposed to it either by education or personal experience.

I've been lucky to have been something of a nomad, but that comes with its challenges which go way beyond the practical or homesickness. I can say that even within the English language there are VAST regional and cultural differences in modes of expression. Interestingly, the folks I've known who MOST seem to recognize it are linguists and especially professional translators - professions where a recognition of the importance of localized metaphor, unspoken nuance, idiomatic expressions, etc, are absolutely KEY to success. But I digress.

Based on my own experience, I believe that internationally common tongues sometimes fail us to a degree because of this. In some places, culture is more "individualized" - a sort of "what can I do" which often includes a sort of "me against the world" outlook. (I do not mean selfishness. Not at all. I mean it's a starting point, not a goal.) Presenting one's thoughts can best be accomplished by conveying strong, even absolute conviction in one's position, which - "me against the world" - can lead to generalized and sometimes forceful statements. At home, that would be a starting point for discussion and debate, and would be returned in kind. In other places, discussion takes more of an "improv comedy" style, wherein "yes, and..." is the mode of debate. In still others, the places and types of silence can convey just as much about someone's position and can be just as persuasive as words themselves. Sarcasm is especially regionalized, and conveyed differently from place to place. Body language is universally important in adding nuance or clarification to any statement in any place. Put these sorts of things in a blender, and you can easily find misunderstandings where some come off aggressive or as "talking down" to others, others unusually meek, still others appearing to agree when actually, they are not agreeing at all, etc.

I have also observed that in real life situations, differences in regional accents afford a certain amount of grace toward these differences, even when we're not actively conscious of any of the above. (This, I can say with absolute certainty, because I have also lived in a few places long enough to have taken on a floating accent, and when I'm visiting any of these places for more than a day or so, that grace if I stumble back into other modes of expression disappears with whichever accent I got off the plane with 😂)

Unfortunately, online, we don't have this constant audible reminder that a person is something of an "other" coming from some other place where modes of communication may be different. Even people who deal with language as their professional bread and butter can easily forget in online spaces. We tend to hear whatever we read in our local accent, and things such as metaphor and sarcasm may be misconstrued, "individualized conviction" modes may come across as shocking and rude, or the many and varied uses of silence may go completely unnoticed, etc.

Anyway. If you have read this whole novella, thank you. 💕 I have debated posting something like this for a looong time, because I wonder sometimes if conflict I see within fandoms (and educational groups, and professional groups, and and and) might arise, fundamentally, from these sorts of misunderstandings. I do not intend it as a callout to any person or group of people. Perhaps, hopefully, simply food for thought.