#Sorta mixing season 2 and season 1 designs

[razmahdaz-art]

More Warmups! I attempted to keep both under an hour, but Riz ran longer because I tried so many times to draw a gun. I couldn’t so you get a gunless boy!

[secret-engima]

I’m interested in hearing more about that AU you told me about before- the RWBY/HTTYD fusion(?) where Oscar is basically Hiccup and Ozpin is the dadliest Nightfury ever :)

OH YES THAT WAS A FUN IDEA.

Okay so like- RWBY/HTTYD fusion kinda thing where instead of vikings there’s Remnant characters. And possibly Remnant’s world. Anyway dragons are a thing, dragons are something people all have strong mixed opinions on because most dragons are furious monsters that try to destroy human settlements at any turn, but there are stories and legends of a time centuries ago when dragons were peaceful and tamable and kind.

Oscar has no real opinion on the legends. He’s mostly scared of dragons after an attack of a huge flock of Terrible Terrors when he was a small child left his hands and neck all scarred up. Even so, he doesn't ... really hate them? They’re wild animals. They’re just angry ones. He and his Aunt are pretty good at keeping their farm unnoticed when a flock passes overhead and as long as it stays that way, he’s fine. Any stray dragon that comes by and starts making noises to set the barn on fire or steal livestock, his Aunt deals with it. She’s a good shot.

Then one day, his hideout is broken into.

Now, his hideout isn’t really a “hideout” it’s just the old barn that the farm doesn’t use anymore. it’s too far away from the house, right on the edge of their property. But nobody has a reason to go there, so as long as he’s careful, Oscar gets to use it as his own little clubhouse. He stores books in there, and notebooks to sketch in, and all the junk he likes to tinker with because he likes building things on the side. His aunt says that maybe someday he can get a scholarship to a proper school for engineering and stuff.

He’s always careful not to store food in there, so that the wild animals of any kind have no reason to try to get in, and he locks it when he leaves.

So he is understandably VERY surprised when he comes in and finds a DRAGON on the floor of his hideout, having apparently broken in through the old window on the upper floor. The dragon stirs when Oscar gasps in fear, moves faster than Oscar can think and suddenly Oscar is pinned by a dark paw as the dragon looms over him with bloody, sharp teeth and furious gold eyes.

So this is how he dies then.

He squeezes his eyes shut with a whimper, waiting for the half-remembered agony of being mauled by a dragon to start (it had hurt so bad as a child and this dragon was so much bigger than a Terrible Terror-).

Hot breath on his face and then instead of pain, a low noise that was too soft to be a growl. Oscar whimpers again because please, please don’t try to eat him alive or something, but instead of pain the paw just leaves his chest and when Oscar dares to open his eyes and sit up, the dragon has limped away to curl up in a corner of the hideout again.

....Dragons aren’t supposed to let humans live.

......They probably aren’t supposed to look so exhausted and in pain and bloody either.

Oscar knows he should run. Go get his Aunt so she can come put the dragon down before it changes its mind and hurts him but-. The dragon looks at him, and gold eyes aren’t furious anymore. Just resigned. Scared. The dragon looks like it’s been on the losing side of a very bad fight with something that wasn’t human. There are gashes where scales have been clawed away, and when its tail slides slowly to curl around its paws, Oscar can see its missing a tail fin.

...Was this dragon attacked by other dragons?

Curiosity and pity make Oscar hold his silence as he backs slowly out of the barn and shuts the door behind him. He ... maybe it will go away in a few hours. Once it’s caught its breath.

He peaks in that evening and finds it hasn’t. It’s curled up tightly in the same corner, and he’s pretty sure the dragon is shivering.

He should REALLY tell his Aunt about this.

He brings it a small bucket of fish from the farm’s massive pond the next morning instead.

The dragon looks at him in open surprise and takes the fish as politely as a well trained dog. When it stands up again Oscar flinches, but all it does is sniff at him and then start licking his hair and Oscar yelps from shock more than fear. It’s like a switch has been flipped and even though the dragon is still exhausted and injured, it gently wrestles him down to give him ... a bath? A dragon bath. The dragon is purring while it does so. Oscar takes it as a form of thank you and has to work hard to snag a shower before Auntie Em can see him covered in dragon drool.

It takes a few more tentative visits to realize that 1. the dragon can’t leave because he can’t fly anymore, 2. he’s not actually black like Oscar thought, but a really deep, rich green in the sunlight when the dragon sneaks out to the old back field for a sun nap, and 3. Oscar is pretty sure he’s been adopted by the dragon. It (he, the dragon is a he), keeps cooing at him and trying to follow him and giving him tongue baths and offering him regurgitated bits of fish, which Oscar frantically turns down each time.

He names the dragon Ozpin, after one of the few dragon stories he knows where the dragon isn’t a horrible monster, and the first time he uses it, Ozpin reacts like it’s always been his name.

Oscar realizes halfway through designing a new tail fin for Ozpin that 1. this design is going to need a rider and 2. he’s had a dragon for about three months now and still hasn’t told his aunt. That ... will probably come back to bite later. But by now he’s more afraid of her reaction over the delay than her reaction over the dragon. So he keeps putting it off.

He kinda sorta really wants to ride Ozpin before his aunt can shut the idea down.

Ozpin expected to die that night he fled. Hundreds of seasons he’d managed to keep ahead of Salem, his mad former mate, freeing dragons from her control in twos and threes and hiding them away where she would not find them again, and she had finally caught him. He had been betrayed. Willingly. Leo’s eyes had been clear as day as he stood by Salem’s side, not glazed with her hate and control, and that hurt almost as much as the claws of her horde of dragons (always a horde, never leaving the risk that she will have to fight him alone, because she knows that in an equal fight, he would win, just like he almost had last time) tearing apart his scales, driving him from the air before he managed to fight some of them off and escape.

He’s not sure when he lost his tail fin. But that is a death sentence to a dragon like him. A dragon who cannot fly is a dead dragon, either by starvation, by Salem, or by the humans who have long forgotten what it was like to be friends and companions to dragon kind.

Ozpin wakes up in a human structure and can’t remember how he got in, but he hears movement and pained instinct drives him up to attack (what if it’s Salem, what if it’s one of her scouts, a poor dragon that Ozpin is too weak to free from her control and will have to kill to save himself like the coward he is-).

A child.

A human child.

Oh. Oh dear.

He really is going to die.

Ozpin removes his paw, hoping he didn’t break any fragile bones (human hatchlings were so *delicate*, he remembered that even after so long) and slinks to a far corner. He could run again, but he’s too tired and too heartsick. Let the boy call his parents.

At least the humans would probably make his death quick.

Except the boy does not call his parents, he leaves and pokes his head in hours later as if to check if Ozpin is still there. He leaves again and the next morning arrives with a bucket of fish to feed him. It is strange and kind and strange because it is kind and when he sniffs at the boy in curiosity, looking for a reason, the child doesn’t run, just flinches nervously. He smells of only one guardian and no other hatchlings. He smells nervous and a bit frightened and ... lonely.

Ozpin finds himself gently pulling the child close and bathing him before he can think better of it, and it is foolish, to risk claiming another human hatchling, he hasn’t shared his Life with a Rider in a long long time (not since Salem killed the last one before his eyes back when he was young and foolish and still thought he could call her back from the edge of madness), but he is so grateful and lonely and this child is all but aching with the need for love. Why else would he risk bringing Ozpin food when all the stories men tell nowadays are of how dragons are bloodthirsty monsters?

The boy keeps coming back, bringing just enough fish to take the edge of Ozpin’s hunger, and even though his days are numbered, Ozpin stays and croons and tries to impart love on the child who is so lonely he would befriend a monster. He lets the boy tentatively climb on him and touch his scales, even lets him inspect Ozpin’s injured, ruined tail. He can’t help it. He always loved hatchlings, human or dragon, and it’s been so *long*-.

The boy takes to sketching and building ... something. Ozpin isn’t entirely certain what. He almost jumps out of his scales when Oscar (that was the boy’s name he learned at last) calls him Ozpin, calls him by name, and then learns that there still are a handful of stories of the Old Days. Dismissed as myth now. It’s amusing to be named after himself.

Ozpin frets quietly over the child sometimes, because while he can smell a guardian on him, he has never seen this guardian, even from afar. He knows this barn is on the edge of Oscar’s little territory, but even so, what guardian lets her hatchling wander off so frequently and never thinks to check on him? Sometimes Oscar falls *asleep* in here, curled up against Ozpin’s side and tucked under a wing, and only wakes up when Ozpin nudges him up because he can hear the far off bell that he thinks means it’s time for his hatchling to go home and eat.

He wishes Speaking Stones still existed. That he’d managed to save more of them, or that he was able to fly and get one. The only way to exchange true words without a Speaking Stone would be a Rider bond and- and he can’t do that to Oscar. It wouldn’t be fair.

He doesn’t deserve to be dragged into a war for freedom of mind that Ozpin and dragon kind has been losing for seasons upon seasons.

Except the child doesn’t seem to think so, doesn’t even know what he flirts with when he tentatively drags in a rudimentary replacement tail fin and saddle as well as a harness to connect them.

Ozpin tries to reject it. As much as he wants (needs) to fly, it’s too dangerous. The boy pouts and sets the harness and gear aside, muttering to himself that he’ll just leave it in the barn for a while until “Ozpin gets used to the smell”.

Ozpin snorts. Because he is not a dog that can be tricked into forgetting something exists thank you.

Oscar sticks his tongue out at him. Adorable, feisty, silly little hatchling.

[novantinuum]

On the corrupted!Steven theory...

So, originally when I mused on this yesterday I was just playing around with random possibilities.

After combing the series for info about corruption, though, I’m mildly spooked at the increased potential for this to... perhaps be a thing? I’m not saying that this is what I for sure believe will happen- to be honest, I’m not even sure Crewniverse would go this direction at all- but just for funsies, let’s see what kind of “evidence” or “foreshadowing” exists that might support this potential story path in the context of canon.

(EDIT: 10/7/19 

I honestly no longer think this creature is a worm at all whatsoever, it’s either more akin to a horned caterpillar or potentially has limbs. Either way we can see so little right now that it’s hard to tell. I’m not editing the rest of this post because I want it to exist in its original form- but do keep this in mind reading the rest! XP)

1) The design of this worm creature.

Let’s start simple. Let’s start tangible. 

For future reference and simplicity, I will be henceforth be referring to this creature as... “Wormy Boi.”

So, let’s see what we’ve got here. I’m definitely not the first person to point out this fella’s pink nature, and the jarringly human-like nose they’ve got. (Compared to other corruptions, which have had distinctly non-humanoid features.) In the photo above, we also have Wormy Boi sporting glowing pink eyes, which then send out a flare of pink light/energy. So, seemingly a powerful entity.

If you watch the short segment before they sit upright, you’ll see that Wormy Boi is super, super big. They’re in the background, but BOY do they loom. The shadows cast upon them especially push that sense of size. They’ve also got a whole bunch of spikes on their back and framing their face.

So, then. What evidence could be made for this being a corrupted!Steven, as opposed to some other run-of-the-mill monster?

Steven Universe Future is a limited series, described as ‘tying up loose ends.” To me, as a viewer, it would make far more sense for the antagonists/conflicts to deal with big concepts that have already been established since there’s such a limited amount of time we have left with this world. Introducing a completely alien species in the last act of the show would feel offbeat from both a writing and a viewing perspective. Corruption- on the other hand- is something we don’t have full answers to yet.

We don’t see any gem, yes- but Steven’s gem is- of course- on his belly. If this theory were to be true, that would translate to the gem being on Wormy Boi’s underside, far out of our sight in this shot, due to how massive they are. As an addition to this, not showing the gem gives an air of mystery to this creature’s true nature- which makes it seem like there’s something surprising to discover here.

A corrupted diamond would surely be MASSIVE. Also, very powerful. The beam of pink light hints at Wormy Boi being quite a powerhouse.

The spikes on Wormy Boi’s back and around their face highly resemble rose thorns. We all know how much the Crewniverse loves their rose symbolism, and design wise, this aspect would make a lot of visual sense for a corrupted Steven. Running off of that:

The face/nose shape and the five horns on this creature’s head give off a very Steven-like silhouette. 

The nose, of course. The face has a very Steven-like shape to it, overall- although noticeably more angular and sharp. The mouth is reminiscent of the Watermelon Stevens’ mouths. And as for the horns, there’s five of them positioned equidistant around their face, just as Steven’s hair is always formed from five lil’ bumps at the same positions.

Okay, moving on.

(Read more under the cut!)

2) We do not yet understand the true nature of corruption.

“I guess it’ll take more than a kiss to heal damage from the Diamonds…” -Pearl, Monster Reunion

Corruption is still- bafflingly- a huge mystery. The Gems we’ve watched the CGs bubble since season one have been healed, yes, but there are still many gaps in our understanding of it. With Steven Universe Future’s promise to address some lingering story threads, it would make sense if corruption was on the plate for further discussion. So, what DO we know?

We know it’s something the Diamonds can do. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to require all four diamonds. Three of them together were able to cause all the damage to Earth. There’s also no statement made that more than one Diamond is required to cause effects like that. 

In Legs From Here to Homeworld, Blue and Yellow Diamond weren’t actually aware the corruption was something they were capable of producing. They seemed to assume they obliterated the Gems on Earth. Corruption is then, even a mystery to them. That’s... odd, isn’t it?

Pearl states that it’s “something nearly impossible to describe.” Garnet goes further to say... “It’s sorta like... if MC Bear-Bear didn’t tear the fabric of his arm, but the fabric of his mind.”

"A sound… A song?” There’s a lot of association between corruption and music.

It causes Gems to lose touch with their usual forms, instead warping into a more outwardly "monstrous” version of themselves that appear to be “just a bundle of fight-or-flight reflexes and survival instincts.” As seen by Centipeetle in Monster Buddy and Monster Reunion, it appears as if corrupted Gems try to regenerate with their original forms if unbubbled, but are simply not in a state where they can maintain that.

As seen with Jasper in Earthlings, extreme emotional distress very much seems to speed up corruption’s effects. This is less of a stated fact and more of my read on that episode, but I believe it to be an important tidbit, especially since Garnet states that corruption’s damage is mental rather than physical, at least at its core. This can also be seen in Monster Reunion with how Centipeetle’s partial healing backfires when she remembers the trauma of being corrupted and reacts strongly.

Now, when it comes to healing corruption, Steven tries to heal Centipeetle himself, and does make some nice progress... helping her regain a hold on herself as he treats her with love and compassion and understanding... but it’s ultimately not a healing that can occur in isolation, helping her on his own. She needs more support before she can heal from this corruption to a state where she can truly be herself again.

And that eventually comes in the form of the other Diamonds. So, all four diamonds can help relieve the corruption if they help these Gems all together. 

3) How could this theory potentially fit into the story anyways, you nutter?

Well, here’s the part of this post where I make some broad conjectures. I honestly am shooting fish into a barrel here because again- we know barely anything about how corruption actually happened initially, and my thoughts are very jumbled. Please forgive me.

"I don’t really know how the corruption works. It’s like they’re sick. They don’t remember who they used to be.” -Steven, Gem Hunt

So, corruption seems to be a mental ailment of Gemkind, turned manifest. It also seems to have a deep connection to a Gem’s emotions, with Centipeetle growing smaller and slightly calmer upon feeling more secure in Steven’s presence, and corruption speeding up as Jasper grew more and more emotionally overwrought and self-deriding about herself. 

When it comes to the Diamonds and how they perhaps caused it originally- without fully realizing- we know that at least Blue and White have abilities focused on causing others to act in certain ways. Blue has sway over one’s emotions, and White has a knack for forcing her thoughts and self upon others. (I’m not sure how Yellow’s ability would play in here.) Mayhaps, mixed with their grief and guilt and anger, their power simply pressed all of that hurt emotion onto all the Gems on Earth in one whole fail swoop...? Tearing their minds in the process of it all?

The question I still have, though- is whether a single diamond could produce effects like this. And whether a diamond could turn that ability on themself.

Could Steven accidentally corrupt himself? Why might that happen?

Well, let’s look at our boy here. 

He’s got a wide circle of support at this time in canon, but notably, he’s notorious for bottling up his emotion and not letting others in to help him- instead dropping everything to help them with their problems. Just to name a few examples (a few):

The Test. He feels betrayed and hurt at the Gems for a moment about the way they’re babying him with the rigged test, but instead of admitting the hurt he feels about the scenario, bottles that up to help them feel more like good guardians.

Joy Ride. He opens up to the Cool Kids about deep, incredibly troubling stuff that’s long been on his mind, but he’s never once talked about it with his family.

Mindful Education. The perils of bottling one’s emotions is literally the whole plot of the episode. The kid has a full out sobbing breakdown while he’s plunging to his death. Connie gets through to him a little here, but later episodes show that the resolution we see here is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Steven’s internal issues. 

Storm in the Room. Externally, Steven tries so hard to put on a guise of content and positivity, but once alone in Rose’s room feels safe enough to let the full brunt of his emotional trauma come out in an almost explosive manner. Geeze, get this kid some hugs. 

Gemcation. Steven actually fails bitterly on putting on his customary smile in this episode, simply because the weight of his problems have become such an impossible burden to him. When the other Gems are trying to help him open up, he isn’t immediately responsive to their efforts. 

What’s Your Problem? Amethyst spends the whole episode trying to cheer Steven up and find out how he’s doing, and instead Steven downplays his own feelings on the matter and ends up helping her sort out her own emotional issues.

So to sum: Many an Emotional Issue, a chronic tendency to avoid outwardly addressing said issues in favor of helping everyone else instead... and to avoid accepting other people’s help.

Even if he’s surrounded by all these people who love him, the fact of the matter is that Steven still feels as if he has to face his own inner demons alone.

Now, let’s look at the lil’ teasing synopsis that was given for Steven Universe Future:

“After saving the universe, Steven is still at it, tying up every loose end. But as he runs out of other people’s problems to solve, he’ll finally have to face his own.”

Blatantly sounds like we’re gonna finally get some addressing of Steven’s emotional state, now doesn’t it?

4) A concept on what could, theoretically happen

“Maybe… it IS a guy in a monster costume. I don’t mean literally, silly! What I mean is... there might be a conscious Gem still inside there, somewhere. What if the monster is turning back and forth into its original form? If it is, it might not be as corrupted as we think! There might still be a chance to save it!” -Steven, Gem Hunt

Suppose Steven- by some as-of-yet unknown means- ends up accidentally corrupting himself. His sorry emotional state only further amplifies the effects of this corruption, and makes it really hard to retain control. Wormy Boi as a form could be like... all his inner demons made manifest, a metaphoric mirror into his current mental state. But- as he is half-human- he’s not entirely unaware of what’s happening. Perhaps... as the quote above could be sneaky foreshadowing for... how he’s turning back and forth between this corrupted form and his normal form. 

He likely wouldn’t want everyone to see him like this, doesn’t want everyone to visibly know the sheer depth of how much he’s hurting. But just like the corrupted Gems were only able to be helped in community, with the support of the CGs and the Diamonds in preparing the fountain, Steven can’t fix this on his own. 

He can no longer face the dark alone.

At some point, everyone has to take a brave step. Reach out. Accept help. 

Steven’s helped so many people, and surely he deserves that same love and care in return, too.

And perhaps, when he’s eventually healed from this- and has gotten the opportunity to be open with his family and friends about the hurt he’s facing- he’ll be left with “corruption scars” as well. I think it’s an important thing to address, that no one goes through experiences like these without lingering effects. Stuff stays with you. Healing is not always linear. But life is a continuous journey, and with the support of people who love you surrounding, you too can make a change... can continue to live to the fullest at every moment possible.

I think the above would be a lovely moral for Steven Universe to tackle in its last run of episodes, no matter how they approach it- daft corruption theory or not.

Now, in the end- a reiteration. This is just a wild theory. I’m not trying to be any authoritative voice saying that this is for sure what will happen, because in reality I have no idea what Crewniverse is cooking. However, I do think it’s fun speculation, and I am kinda spooked at how well things fit. 

Whatever happens, I’m sure it will make me weep like a baby, though. Hoh boy. Grant me sanity in these coming months as we wait for answers.

[chiyuki-hiro]

My Thoughts So Far On 2K12 TMNT

Quick note I’m tagging @obsidianfr3sk​ ‘cause I thought you might wanna know how I feel about the show so far since I told you I started watching it. Hope that’s okay.

So far, I’m only a handful of episodes into season 2. My feelings are kind of mixed. It started out good, I thought the first few episodes I watched were pretty funny. Then....I don’t know. I kind of started getting bored. I’m still gonna keep watching though, from what I heard, the show does keep getting better & I wanna give it a chance. 

Some of things I do like: 1. The turtles’ designs as well as Splinter's. 2. Raph has a pet turtle!!!! 3. I liked the episode where the turtles had to swap weapons 4. the fact that the villain's plans either intertwine or oppose each other at times 5. Splinter seems to be written mostly well as both a father to the turtles as well as their mentor 6. the way the turtles emote

Some problems I have so far: 1. I’m sorry but Mikey is annoyingly written (it’s not his fault he’s written as dumb as he is but I felt Rise dealt with this better because all four turtles had their dumb-ass moments, even Donnie! Yeah the others mess up too in this show but I feel like Mikey is written overly dumb compared to his brothers most of the time for the sake of making him the butt of the joke.) 2. The humans look.....way too much like plastic figurines (I know it’s a kids’ show meant to sell toys but it kindda takes me out of the show when the turtles bring up that fact that they look like “scary monsters” to the humans but I, a human, think they look more appealing than the human characters) 3. there was an episode where the turtles were somewhat responsible for April’s dad getting turned into a mutant & when she found out that they were slightly responsible she yelled at them & told them she never wanted to see them again. And then she goes MIA from the show for at least a few episodes. (I get she has a right to feel upset about it & she’s a teen so she’s not gonna be thinking rationally in this situation but, I still hate when writers do this. Can’t we just once have a character say they’re angry/upset at another character & walk away saying they need to cool off for a bit without it being overly dramatic?)  4. I feel like April should have spent more time with the turtles on screen before the big blow-up I mentioned in #3. Yeah she gets a decent amount of screen time but it felt like it was mostly with Splinter, since he was training her on the side so she could fend for herself. She should have been shown hanging out with the boys more to show that she really cared about them & why them being responsible for her dad’s transformation would feel like such a betrayal to her, even if they clearly didn’t mean for it to happen.

To end this on a slightly more positive note, I just wanna add that so far, I think Leo is actually my favorite turtle for this one. I loved Donnie in Rise but I just think he’s alright on 2k12 so far. Leo however, is kind of a geek who loves watching this cheesy show that sorta looks like a cross between Star Trek & Heman. And he wants to prove that he can be a good leader but he doesn’t quite have it all figured out yet, mixed with the fact he keeps getting pressured by Splinter to do better as leader & really the poor kid just needs a break. 

So, yeah. That’s pretty much it for right now.

[kolbisneat]

MONTHLY MEDIA: March 2021

Hey March was a weird month what with all the pandemic anniversaries and such but here we are. It’s March. Goodbye March.

……….FILM……….

Attack the Block (2011) After about 20 minutes my partner asked if this was basically a British episode of Goosebumps and....she’s not wrong? I liked it back when it came out but it’s aged really well. Tight script and casual class politics along with the very good space stuff.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) It turns out I’d remembered so little of this movie that it was essentially a fresh viewing. The artistry and ambition still holds up today plus a noir set in L.A. is always good time. But then you add cartoon hijinks and it’s all just that much better.

The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney Spears  (2021) So we watched the ep on Britney Spears and...it didn’t really seem to cover all that much. It kept feeling like it was about to start and then after an hour and a half of that it just sorta wraps with a small legal victory. I know this isn’t fiction so I’m not expecting a happy ending, but I don’t know what it wanted to say.

CBS presents Oprah with Meghan and Harry  (2021) I mean I don’t think anything said or shared was surprising anyone. Though I appreciate Oprah not letting either of them sidestep a question. Either answer or say you won’t; none of this fancy poetry.

……….TELEVISION……….

Great British Bake Off (Episode 9.01 to 9.04) This is our first season without Mary Berry, Sue, and Mel and it’s a real shift! But despite all the new faces, it still feels very much like the good-natured GBBO I’ve come to love. Great stuff.

City of Ghosts (Episode 1.01 to 1.06) I hope all that I’m seeing about this means that Netflix will greenlight another season and more television like this. The artistry is fantastic, the concept allows for both whimsy and poignancy, and it’s casually funny in a way that I can’t fully describe. Great stuff.

WandaVision (Episode 1.09) So this didn’t quite stick the landing for me. I figured there’d be some blasts and magic and zooming around in the sky, but I also assumed we’d get some resolution (maybe even consequences) for what Wanda did to the town. Sure, she’s not the villain and it wasn’t intentional, but the show appeared to be built around this theme of denial and acceptance yet abandoned that in the end. But I will give it this: it really has sold me on the relationship between Wanda and Vision.

The Night Manager (Episode 1.05 to 1.06) You know I think I’ve been so primed by Bond films and action set pieces that, while I won’t spoil the ending, I was pleasantly surprised by how it wrapped up. It was a nice change of pace. 

The Bachelor (Episode 25.09 to 25.12) What a season. It was a mess, sure, but I also think it was the uncomfortable mix of stagnation and progress. The show needs to evolve and I feel like the finale and aftershow really highlighted that the change has to happen. Maybe it’s starting to happen already or in future seasons it’ll change whether production likes it or not.

……….READING……….

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (Complete) Really fantastic read and such an effortless blend of science fiction and...necromantic fantasy! Dark and gross and light and funny all at the same time. 100% recommend and am very excited for the next entry despite this feeling whole and complete on its own.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (Complete) I want to work my way through the series (or at least the original 14 written by Baum) so we gotta start at the beginning! There’s such a light air about the book that everyone kinda just rolls with everything. Sentient objects and talking animals and lots of murder are just met with a “Great! on to the next adventure!” and I love it.

The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum (Complete) It’s really great that the second book has a lot of the same core components (human child meets a bunch of wacky sidekicks while on a very small adventure) yet casually expands the mythos and world. It even builds on the plot established by the first book (the main conflict revolving around Scarecrow being overthrown as leader of Oz ever since the Wizard disappeared). Great stuff.

Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum (Complete) Bringing back Dorothy and it’s really a merging of characters from book 1 and 2. If anything, this series is shaping up to be about making friends and the genial conflict resolution is really heartwarming. Now i’m keen to watch Return to Oz.

Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum (Complete) This might just be me but I find a mostly human cast (outside of Jim the Cab Horse) to be far less interesting than the diverse adventuring parties of the first three books. Lots of fun stuff in here and playing fast and loose with the world-building works well; highlight the fun parts of a land made of wood and then continue on to the next location! Great stuff.

Delicious in Dungeon Vol. 9 by Ryoko Kui (Complete) It feels like everything is starting to come together and wrap up and I’m totally here for a story that knows what it wants to do. And while there doesn’t seem to be as much room cooking with the overarching plot that is driving the story, it never feels like it’s moved away from the heart of the characters and for that I can’t recommend it enough. Excellent world-building, excellent cast, and really great humor.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The IDW Collection Volume 9 by Kevin Eastman, Tom Waltz, Mateus Santolouco, Dave Wachter, Pablo Tunica, Sophie Campbell, and many more! (Complete) The human/secret agent stuff will always be boring to me (even if they’re hunting the turtles) cause that’s not what I want in a comic. I don’t want Batman hunting burglars, I want bright colourful villains for our bright and colorful heroes. Luckily we get into a pocket dimension for a toad god and his relatives during the second half of the volume. Overall, still my favourite ooze series.

……….AUDIO……….

Musicalsplaining (Podcast) Great host dynamics and hot dang I love a good musical.

……….GAMING……….

Neverland: A Fantasy Role-Playing Setting (Andrews McMeel Publishing) The group has taken a break from the infected giant colony to sort out some Pirate drama! Further session breakdowns are over here on Reddit!

Dungeons & Designers (Podcast) I had the rare chance to play in a D&D campaign instead of run it and it’s even up online! They also air the sessions through their podcast!

And that’s it! As always, let me know anything you think I should check out and thanks for reading.

Happy Wednesday.

[jwood719]

Thurmond, West Virginia: a Rail Road Town that the World Passed By, Then Found Again (sorta’) - Updated.

As I explained recently over a dinner with friends in town (for the first time in how long?!), Thurmond, West Virginia was south and west of Pittsburgh, so it seemed like a good option for a kind-of side trip on the way home from Pennsylvania.  Little did I know how long the trip south would be, but glad I was to have done it.

A CSX coal car drag passing the Thurmond Depot, as seen through the window of the yardmaster’s office. [1]

The town was founded by one Capt. W.D. Thurmond in 1873, the same year the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway completed main line track building through the New River Valley.  The New River Valley was scene to intensive coal mining in the latter half of the 1800s and first half of the 1900s, and Thurmond was literally and figuratively at the heart of it all.

I believe the tall structure visible through the coal smoke and vented steam is the coaling tower. [2]

Thurmond in 1988.  Conspicuously absent now are all the structures on the left side of the tracks -- as well as the tracks to the left. [3]

The New River Valley was also the scene of some of the worst of the “coal field wars:” the operators paid by weight, ran company towns and stores, and lured unsuspecting laborers into the valley with promises of good wages -- promises that never materialized.  Instead, coal weight was shorted, company rents and store fees were exorbitant, and rules were enforced with extra-judicial posses, bought-off law enforcement officers, and state militia at times.  Miners were repeatedly denied recognition of their unionizing efforts, scabs were thrown in between the simmering, or boiling, antagonists, and strikes devolved into shooting matches.

Thurmond in 1988. [3]  Two generations of water towers (near center) holding hundreds of thousands of gallons of water for the thirsty steam-powered engines, and the post office building (at right)  CSX removed the water towers in the 1990s.

Concrete footings for the water towers seen in the 1988 photo above.  The post office building still stands (at far right), and is still U.S.P.S. property, though it is no longer in operation. [1]

Thurmond was the vital hub for the C&O and for all the various people who moved through the Valley throughout the coal mining years; in 1910, Thurmond  moved more freight and passengers than any other town the rail road serviced.  It’s hard to imagine today, but from its founding until the early 1920s, Thurmond could only be reached by rail, and thousands of people moved through or lived in the town, going to work in a mine, working for the C&O, or providing goods and services.

The Marilyn Brown house, with the roofline of the Fatty Lipscomb house beyond. [1]

At one time, Thurmond boasted many commercial structures, scores of houses (like those above), and was also a service hub for the C&O’s engines and rolling stock.  Steam-powered rail road engines require daily maintenance, work that was effected in a large engine house that was perched above the river.

Thurmond in 1988. [3] The engine house is right of center in the mid-ground, behind the trees.  Some of the remaining private houses can be seen uphill behind the commercial buildings, as well as the one “street” that wound across the face of the hill.

Like so many towns built around 19th century industries, Thurmond’s importance declined dramatically as the 20th century proceeded.  The use of diesel rail road engines left steam engine mechanics unemployed; many of the mines played out, and those that remained (and remain still) employed far fewer miners to pull the coal from the seams -- or blast it from hill tops; and people who would have been passengers on the trains began driving automobiles.  The world, if you will, moved on, and Thurmond dried up.

Two views of the Fatty Lipscomb house. [1]

As coal mining declined, though, tourism increased, and in the 1960s and 1970s, enthusiasts of outdoor sports found the U.S. Congress receptive to the idea of setting aside some of West Virginia’s landscapes for boating, hiking and camping.  In 1978, a substantial swath of West Virginia was designated as the New River Gorge National River, and later, lands along the Gauley and Bluestone Rivers were conserved, designated as National Recreation Areas in 1988.

Another house, here perched on the hillside above the commercial district, and a stretch of the local roadway, looking downhill. [1]

Once the land along the rivers became national reserves, Thurmond basically passed into federal control, though up until the early 1990s, up to 50 people still resided there.  The Chesapeake & Ohio had also declined, and became a foundational holding of today’s CSX Transportation rail road company.  CSX still moves coal through Thurmond in long drags of hopper cars, either full and destined for power plants, or empty and heading back to the mines.

In 1988 (above) [3] and in 2021 (below). [1]  The view below is perhaps the best known angle of the old commercial buildings.  From right, these are: the Mankin-Cox Building, the oldest of the three, which housed a druggist and a bank; the Goodman-Kincaid Building, which housed a dry goods store as well as offices and apartments; and the National Bank of Thurmond Building; all held a variety of business concerns before business fled.  To the upper right is the Erskine Pugh house.  The track in the foreground has been removed.

Circa 1900 [2]  The engine house is right of center, with the commercial buildings to the left.  The large building at far left was a hotel, but it burned down and was replaced by an Armour meat company building -- which also burned, in 1963 . The depot (seen following photo) is at the far right, with the rail road trestle just in view.

The 1904 passenger depot, now the NPS visitors center (as of 1995), and yes, Amtrak does have Thurmond as a stop! [1]

The NPS owns most of the remaining buildings, and efforts began in the early 2000s to keep them from deteriorating further, with roof repairs and seals to keep out the weather. There are still 5 residents in Thurmond, all are on the town council, and in addition to being active within the park, they are also seeking ways to keep the town alive.  

The red house at left is new construction, but on an old foundation, and where possible, older building materials have been recycled in its build-out.  A project of Thurmond’s residents, the hope is to have it available for seasonal leases; my guess is it’ll wind up with a long wait-list -- and my name will be on it! [1]

Old rail road ties in the dirt: now an access road, the C&O service track that led to the coaling tower were once mounted here; the engine house would have been to the extreme right and partially out of view; the depot is dead ahead, and my road-weary car is parked near the trees. [1]

Maybe I was taken-in by the town because of the setting, nestled as it is among the hills and above the river; maybe it’s because the old buildings have that “certain something” that makes history buffs like me snap more photos than is reasonable; maybe it’s the potential that I can see in them (provided anyone ever coughed up the money to really rehabilitate them); if I was to get metaphysical about it, maybe it’s because of all the lives and history that occurred in the area and the energy left behind calls out still (y’know if I got metaphysical about it -- past lives anyone?); perhaps it’s all of those.  What-ever the reason, I’ve been thinking of making a trip back in mid-Autumn, take a long weekend as the leaves are turning and it’s got chilly -- and shoot yet more photos than is reasonable.

The 1922 coaling tower (above), built by Fairbanks Morse (as noted on the sign below). [1]

The reason for the coaling tower: a pair of the last steam engines in Thurmond: 1953. [2]

I briefly stopped at the New River Gorge visitors center where I got directions, and figured I could at least find out where I was going before getting off the highway for the night.  I arrived in Thurmond just before 5 PM, but even that later afternoon hour left plenty of daylight to walk about and take photos.  My thought had been to simply find Thurmond, then make my stop-over somewhere nearby (Beckley, WV is less than 10 miles away) then return in the morning.  That thinking quickly became “Oh! I can come back for more in the morning!” 

Up the hill: the old church. [1]  The church grounds now host the local triathlon and reunion events for those who once lived in Thurmond.

What I realized as I strolled around in the afternoon, was that the light would be dramatically different if I arrived early the next day (yeah: a “well duh!” moment if ever there was one), an effect of the changed daylight hours mixed with the topography that proved itself quite wonderfully -- and is why the images here show both the golden glow of evening and the cool white of morning.

Amtrak’s Cardinal route-train, on-time (or nearly) on a Friday morning. [1]

Standing by my car, having a sip of coffee, looking around as other visitors arrived or departed, I just, well -- “sighed with contentment” is an apt description. 

A view of the ticket agent’s office. [1]

For more information on Thurmond:

The National Park Service’s web page for Thurmond, WV.

Thurmond, WV on Clio, a history and culture website.

Both of these share some of the same information, and each has additional images, both historical and contemporary.  

A view of the New River Valley from the west side, across from Thurmond (note the houses and rail road cars on the far bank below the hill). [4]

The historical narrative written here was gleaned from the NPS hand-out for Thurmond, as well as from the Summer 2021 issue of National Parks magazine, published by the National Parks Conservation Association (“Miner’s Angel” concerning Mother Jones and the coal field wars of West Virginia, by Nicolas Brulliard).  Identification of the Marilyn Brown house made possible by access to a PDF of the NPS’ structural assessment report of buildings in Thurmond, revised edition, published in 2002.

A view of the yardmaster’s office [1]

Atlas Obscura’s “22 of America’s Best Preserved Ghost Towns”  Sorry, Mental Floss, you were forgot.

Looking south toward the depot past the three old commercial blocks. [1]

[1] Photographs by R. Jake Wood, 2021.

[2] Historic photographs displayed on-site by National Park Service, photographed on-site and edited for this posting by Jake Wood. 

[3] Photographs by Jet Lowe, 1988, for the Library of Congress’ Historic American Building Survey/Historic American Engineering Record; retrieved from the Library of Congress’ Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, with minor editing by Jake Wood.

[4] Photograph by the Detroit Publishing Co., circa 1910; from the Library of Congress’ Prints & Photographs Online Catalog, with minor editing by Jake Wood.

The depot, alongside CSX trackage. [1]

CSX coal drag outbound with hoppers full of coal.  The post office building is visible just beyond the engine. [1]

[awwrealmonsters]

Top 12 Breath of the Wild Monsters (Part 2 of 2)

(Part 1 -

#8 - The Lord of the Mountain

Out of all of the creatures on this list, this guy’s presence in the game felt the most unique, with the circumstances around his presence making for a genuinely fantastical and ethereal experience. The glowing markings on his body are a neat way to display the godly and ancient elements of the design, I love the soothing and pretty turquoise coloration, and the double faces are just strange enough to make you uncomfortable without being too creepy. I do wish that the rest of the body was more interesting though, as outside the coloration it’s a rather standard horse design. Maybe the owl influences in the face could have been incorporated more. Still overall a solid boy.

#7 - The Blights

The Blight designs are a big upgrade from Calamity Ganons’, as they refine what works about that design into a less busy and more sensible appearance. The ancient machinery aspects are better incorporated here as they are fairly minimal and well placed, as well as serving a narrative purpose as possessed machines. The silhouettes of these guys are very nice and the single eyes masks are quite intimidating. The sludge and machine colors still don’t mix very well here though, blending together too much and making it hard at times to tell what you are looking at. I said they’re LESS busy than Ganon, not that they aren’t busy. The coolness of these guys outweighs most of their flaws though.

#6 - Blupees

You might be surprised to see the very simple design of the Blupee ranked higher than the Lord of the Mountain, particularly since his simplicity was what I found the most issue with. But Simplicity isn’t always a negative and I think it really works here. Blupees are tiny and there can be quite a lot of them so the basic design works, with the slight owlish markings on it’s front adding just a nice little bit of detail. The color is still very nice and the face is quite cute when theirs only one of them. The antlers make the design resemble a jackalope which helps with the cryptid feel. Plus they are just really cute. While not #1 on this list, Blupees would certainly rank #1 on “best BotW creature to make into a plushie”.

#5 -The Rito

The decision to make the Rito a staple species in Botw is one I fully support. Adding an air-adjacent species to the water-adjacent Zora, Earth-adjacent Gorons, and (sorta) Fire-adjacent Gerudo  just makes sense. I love that the anatomy is absolutely a different species and not just humans with wings. With at least 10 distinctive designs I like that their was an extra effort to make each major character based off a different bird that would highlight aspects of their personality. Kass is a parrot and thus a bard with a big rounded beak that gives him a friendly air, the town elder is a bearded owl because of course he is, and a blue jay is a perfect fit for Revali as an insufferable asshole. The way they use big feathers as “fingers” is a nice compromise to keep the wings looking complete. Overall a lot of them just look very cool. My main complaint is that the “hair” in some of the designs isn’t incorporated super well, they should have stuck with using the feathers to make distinct head shapes rather than trying to emulate human hair.

#4 -Lizalfos

I’m surprised at myself for placing these folk higher than the Rito, but the amount of time I spent facing them in game made them really grow on me. The upgrade from standard lizard to a more chameleon design was a great decision on Nintendo’s part, with the curved back, curly tail, single horn, and those distinctive eyes making for a very memorable monster. The goofy eyes and mouth keep them from looking too intimidating but the way they move and how quick they can be still make them a viable threat. The camouflage ability is also pretty neat and I like all the regional variations. There’s really not anything I dislike about the design, they’re just a few I like more.

#3 -Koroks

This is just peak character design right here. With their tiny rounded tree bodies and silly leaf masks complete with dotted eyes and cut out mouths you immediately understand that these guys are 1-forest spirits and 2-childlike. Their fat little bodies and tiny limbs are both adorable and make you want to help them out. I love that their are so many different leaf designs as each gives off it’s own little personality while still retaining that lighthearted quality. Again this is a simple design, but it conveys everything it needs to. This strikes me as one of the more iconic Zelda designs and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was used as a mascot in future installments.

#2 -The Zora

Look. I get it. I know some people may be tired of the Zora since the internet went crazy for them when the game first came out. Everyone was designing Zora OCs or saying how much they wanted to sleep with Sidon. But. Have you considered. They were Right. Zora’s have been a staple in the Zelda series for a long time now and while the old designs have their charm they’ve never looked better than they do here. The noses have been replaced with head ridges that provide a nice color block between the faces and the adorable head tails, which also provide ‘eyebrow’ esque markings to allow for easier expression without sacrificing the aquatic feel. The fins around the hips serve some extra flair and built in modesty, and having most of the Zora adorn themselves in jewelry but not surely-not-built-for-water fabric is just good world building. The Zora come in more colors then ever before and most are pretty unique shades that are very easy on the eyes. While their isn’t quite as many variants as there are for the Rito, the special shark, whale, and manta ray influenced NPCs are all great and memorable designs. Also they are all huge, which is wonderful. The only thing I would change is to let Mipha have as strong shark influences as her brother. Give me my giant sharp toothed shark girlfriend Nintendo, you cowards!

#1 -Lynel

I went back and forth on the placement of most of the monsters on this list, but there was never any doubt about who the top stop belonged to. There is no comparing the feeling of seeing this thing for the first time, immediately thinking “oh shit” and then promptly getting absolutely wrecked. Intimidating doesn’t even begin to cover this absolutely jacked monstrosity. The pupil-less glowing eyes, big old ram horns, and giant arms all help to make Lynels look as scary as they do, with the lion mane helping to balance out the bottom heavy creature and add some wildness to the design. Lynels are big, sturdy, and have some of the coolest looking weapons in the game. All the variants have pretty good color pallets with the striped ones looking especially nice. I really appreciate the extra detail of giving them scars as well, to help with the seasoned warrior feel .I don’t really know what else to say, Lynels are just cool okay?

Thank you for reading, If you have a favorite BotW monster or think the list should be in a different order, feel free to share your thoughts, I’d love to discuss! :)

[popculturebuffet]

Jake’s Reviews: Amphibia: Quaraller’s Pass and Toadcatcher

On this week’s episodes, Sprig and Polly won’t stop sibling arguing forcing Anne and Hop Pop to leave them on the side of the road to figure it out.. or else. Either way the fighting stops so good times. Meanwhile Sasha and Grime are both reeling from the end of last season with Sasha burying her feelings wide and deep and Grime sinking into a pile of trash, junk food and depression.. so he’s basically become me then and both must rise out of it when the Newts send someone to collect him. We’re on the road to Keith David, come on inside after the cut. Also in more serious stuff suicide trigger warning since.. well the finale of season 1 and all. 

And we’re back.. and this time on the actual day! What a concept.. I kid of course I had good reason last time but it’s still nice to get this out when people will actually care. 

Quaraller’s Pass

We open with Anne and Hop Pop driving the Fwagon, and yes i’ve given up and called it that i’m not made of stone, and remarking about the fact their halfway to newtopia and it’ll only be another two weeks.. a nice meta joke that actually gets to land this time due to the show getting to air week to week for a change. In fact things have gone smoother than Hop Pop thought though both would change one thing: Sprig and Polly have been fighting non-stop.. entirely off screen. Ugh. This annoys me for two reasons: 1 we don’t get an actual on screen scene of them fighting to properly set it up and 2. they’ve been just fine up to this point. Now I will grant shit happens while we’re not looking in shows, that’s fine, life happens and we can’t see every second of characters lives. 

Steven Universe for instance, while falling into forgetting to show us important stuff too sometimes, did this really well in season 5: While the Steven and Connie sepearation arc is a mixed bag, to be sure, they did use the fact Steven couldn’t use lion to check on lars fo ra few weeks well, and by the time we saw him again, he’d gone from hiding with the rest of his newfound friends in the catacombs of homeworld to having not only stolen one of homeworld’s best ships, but having a rivalry with the ships previous owner and having fought her several times, as well as he and the off colors both taking several levels in badass. It was a nice way to speed up things with Lars, as with this probably being the last season as far as the crew knew they didn’t have time for a full episode of lars getting off homeworld, and was a really nice twist when it was revealed and good character development for Lars, showing that seperated from his old baggage and with his self loathing having gone down, just what Lars was capable of.  Here though? It’s just a lazy excuse to have a fued episode. Like the above it is plausable and it’s not a stretch that two siblings would argue nonstop on a road trip. Having an older brother and having been on several your going to fight eventually. Close proximity mixed with lingering tension will do that. The problem here is.. it’s just not in service of anything new or intresting. WIth the above example, the offscreen movments put lars in a new an dintresting place.. and then contrasted it when he started freaking out upon finding out Sadie had gotten a new intresting life herself while he was gone. Here it’s just “Oh wow they’ve been fighting and it’s not funny aside from one brilliant gag we’ll get to” and leads to the obvious conclusion. I don’t expect a huge character thing but I expect more comedically and character wise from this show.  So yeah the two are fighting and bring it outside as they apparently tend to do which, credit where it’s due, is the second funniest gag of the episode, as the two do impressions of each other.. by which I mean Polly and Sprig’s voice actors do the voices for the impressionss, so Sprig’s voice is coming out of polly’s body when she does an impression of him and vice versa. It WOULD have been nice to see the voice actors do the impressions themselves, but it still works on sure surrelaness and on both sides acting obnoxious as polly yells in hop pop’s ear and sprig keeps punching anne. Naturally both , like the audience, want this to end already and faking his death won’t work again. 

Thankfully Hop Pop soon finds a solution: Quarallers Pass, an upcoming pass that works to end fueds and force qualring travel companions to work together.. and it dovetails into the wagon trail so Anne and HOp Pop aren’t just leaving the other half of their family to die. So yeah Hop Pop dumps the two out of the wagon, explains it and the dovetaling thing I just mentioned and when the two start obnoxiously fighting again, he and Anne just leave em. We do get another good bit though as Anne leaves her phone with Sprig to call her, only to realize they only have one phone and sprig has no idea what she wants him to do.  We only see anne and hop pop again once before the finale, with Hop Pop unable to take the silence as Anne enjoys the peace.. until Hop Pop makes the mistake of asking her if she has a boyfriend back home and she responds apporiatley.. but literally kicking him out of the fwagon, and wordlessly suggesting he let that one marinate. I mean.. ther’es no unvierse where that went well, including the one where she said “Nope, Girlfriends” before doing it and let the obvious implications of that given how this series started and who she’s hoping to see soon sink in. 

But yeah the episode goes about how you’d expect, the two fight, then find an obstacle, as the pass is set up to force them to work together, which they do, and the two bond again and enjoy being a team. Because i’ts an effed up world but it’s a two player game. They have a thankfully breif song nad end up finding the exit blocked by a painting, and go into a cave, then fight again and yeah.. this episode is very slight and the laughs mentioned above are the only ones for miles. We do however get another small saving grace for the episode as the two each find a monster wnatin got eat them only to discover it’s ONE beast, split down the middle, a blind eel worm thing that can’t see but it can hear them. The two then manage to escape it and hide and the two eel heads bigger, with Sprig and Polly realizing that’s annoying before using their super vintrloquist skills to escape. If this summary is breif that’s because it’s just.. I really can’t think of many jokes because this episode annoys me though the monster design IS cool and a neat concept, it’s just wrapped in an otherwise weak episodes. The two escaape, deciding to call truce and hug. Awww.  Soon after Anne and Hop Pop arrive with Anne not carring if they passed as she’s been in the middle of a lecture on romantic relationshisp with hop pop.. a fate worse than death to be sure, and end sthe episode shoving him off a cliff when he brings up the boyfriend thing again as he dosen’t learn. The end.  Final Thoughts: As you can tell by how I tried to get through it as fast as possible this time around, I REALLY didn’t like this one. Ther’es a few good gags and an intresting monster as the show is still really good even on it’s off days.. but otherwise it’s just really weak. I HOPED like last week a seemingly benging episdoe would be good but it’s just yoru standard “two characters sudeenly have beef” and getting into sibling rivalry would’ve been fine.. if they hadn’t DONE THIS ALREADY with the movie night episode last season, which was far more intresting and had a solid reason for htem fighting: Polly always gets what she wants and SPrig’s tired of caving to be a good big brother. its a MUCH stronger conflict than “siblings fight sometimes’ hwich they do and would on a road trip, but sometimes realisim dosen’t mean a stories GOOD or should be told, it just means we get two cahracters annoyingly bickering when not teaming up for 5 minute,s and one or two good gags stretched over a very thin 11 minutes, not helepd by it being RIGHT before a far more important and presumibly intresting episode. It’s just.. forgetable, slight and not very good. I coudln’t even find many jokes to make out of it out of a combination of lack of any good material and me just not wanting to dwell on this nothing of an episode for long outside of the great bits of Anne and Hop Pop.

 A really weak episode with some great gags and a waste of a great monster idea. It COULD have been used to have them quarrel, but even siblings who fight over the littest thing still fight over something other than the minor annoyances and a little more substance from a show that’s usually better about providing it would’ve been ncie. Just.. a frustratingly bleh episode.

 Toadcatcher:  Onto our Main Event and the reason the previous episode was even more insufferable. We catch up with Sasha mid-training montage, and naturally given what we saw in the finale she’s swift as a coursing river, with all the force of a great typhoon, the strength of a raging fire and the mystery of the dark side of the moon.. which is to say not a lot. We all know it’s where Cyclops put his house. 

Of course what starts out sorta inspriing ends up.. kinda disturbing as she’s set up training dummies of the plantars and destroys all but one easily and angrily... the last one of course being Hop Pop.. maybe she sees him as a grandpa figure or feels bad about i’m just fucking with you of course it’s Anne. She does get her at sword point. but not before flashing back both to Anne taking her on, and to her own attempted suicide. And already this episode is really engaging just on this one scene: We see WHY Sasha hasn’t reformed overnight and it makes sense: The last time she felt like that, realized the weight of her actions and felt guilt for how she treated Anne and the Others.. she nearly took her own life.. to save them sure, but she still just couldn’t take the sheer weight of it because again 13, and because while Amphibia MIGHT have therapists, she has no acess to one. She probably feels if she lets herself feel like that, THINK about her actions and THINK about what she’s done she might not make it. IT’s a REALLY sobering thought and a really dark place for me to go.. but it’s the place she’s in, lost.

 As a rap musical version of George Washinton put it “I know you have dreams of fighting and dying like a martyer. Dying is EASY young man, living is HARDER. “ It’s one thing to go out in one big gesture, clear away all the things you’ve done, and be done with it.. it’s another to wake up the next morning and realize your still here. She Ra also dealt with this recently with Catra doing largely the same.. sure she didn’t DIE or nearly die, but she was brainwashed, nearly lost herself and then was nearly killed out of spite. It’s the same principal: neither expected to come back, and both have to deal with it. And as I said Sasha is fucking 13. Grown adults can barely deal with tis sort of thing and sometimes they really can’t. How the hell is a child supposed to cope? SO she copes unhealthily, burying her guilt, seeing her attempted saviors as enemies and blaming them. If Hop Pop hadn’t stood up, if they hadn’t taken Anne for her they’d be gone, she and Anne would be happy and Grime would still be in top shape and Sasha.. she woudlnt’ be FEELING guilt or derpession or rage or all this complex feelings. It’s their fault, not hers not grimes not anyone elses. When it’s NOT that easy, it’s not that simple and it’s in now way their fault. And it’s shown by the fact that unlike with the Plantars , who she barely knows and can demonize easy.. she can’t with Anne. Anne’s her best friend, she loves her.. she can’t just.. make her a bad guy because she’s on a diffrent side or demonize her defying Sasha when even if she wont’ admit it Sasha know she was wrong. It’s why I ended up liking this directoin: Change is hard and you have to WANT it for it to stick, and Sasha’s in no mental place to want it right now. She just , much like Anne, wants to get back to some form of normalcy and try and bury it down. 

But with Toad Tower gone things arne’t normal as seen when Sasha calls for Grime to see how she did.. and he’s not there. Grime is instead in a nearbye shack having basically turned into me: a depressed blob of a person binging tv and eating copius amounts of junk food while wondering where time and his life has gone. Okay maybe not the last part but yeah. Also in a nice continuity odd he’s binging on Suspcion Island, the delciously over the top , though given Riverdale which as I mentioned in a previous amphibia recap, yes really, was the show where Archie got mauled by a bear and lived with little to no scars after fleeing to Canda to avoid a cult based around a d and d knockoff and a drug called jingle jangle. I mean when that’s the reality of teen drama these days they only have to crank the knob up by so much.  But yeah Grime’s in a really bad place, can relate obviously, and it’s not what I expected: I expected in grand villian manner for him to have some evil plan and still be corrupting sasha and what not.... but this is actually better. Instead he’s just done, and just lazing about despite Newtopia putting a bounty on his head.. also revealing that he was given the Captain job  by them which is all kinds of worrysome for obvious reasons, but it’s a neat twist, revealing the toad’s were simply used by the Newts as a tool to hold down the frogs. Sasha TRIES breaking him out of it by having percy and braddock stage an attack.. but gives up when it’s clear Grime is just out of fucks to give and not moving from this chair. Nope. Not getting out of this chair. He actually takes it well though, as he’s not only apparently on better terms with the two, but even invites them to watch tv, though Sasha quickly puts the kibosh on that and sends the two into town for suplies.. which really isn’t that bad and they clearly are still happy about it.. I Mean their a brand new couple and the last time they got alone time was when Sasha passed out trianing in the woods and that was ruined when Grime walked in on them during and asked to watch and no one’s talked about it since.  Sasha tries to convince grime to attack the frogs and get his old self back on track.. but he points out that most of their army abandoned him during his downward spiral, and they are in now shape to go on an authritarian rampage and Grime is sure he can handle whoever newtopia sends after him. 

In town we meet our newst antagonist: General Yunaan.  Scourge of the sand wars, defeater of Ragnar the Wretched, and the youngest newt to ever achieve the rank of General in the great Newtopian Army, who does that every time she meets someone new and is annoyed no one around her knows about any of that and just wolverine claws a plate in half to intimdate the dishwasher, but gets nothing.. but WE get reactions from the various townies who reveal that Grime si famous for being a toad who rose from poverty and squalor as a gladiator to glory as a captain. It’s an intresting wrinkle and adds to his backstory: he puts on airs of sophisticaion so much because he came from nothing, and brutally fought his way and explains his lack of people or leadership skills: He was given a simple post intemdating the local helpelss townsfolk for beign good at punching people for the delight of the 1%. They don’t give you managment classes in gladiator arena’s.. at least not since that lion ate his whole class. Lucky for her Braddock and Percy are taking some time for themselves to have a meal and their first date in weeks probably and loudly talk about Grime because they aren’t exactly compitent on a good day. Yunnan tries getting it out of them, feigns giving up when they transparentntly lies, then hides in the ceiling nad finds out Grime’s position when the two naturally blab the minute they think she’s gone because while their sweethearts and I hope they have a long and happy life together, their loyal not compitent. Sometimes you gotta pick one or the other. It’s why Megatron keeps starscream around: He’s not LOYAL, but he can be compitent in the right continuity. 

Back at the camp, which we now know is an abandoned mill, Sasha tries to light a fire under Grime.. when Yunann approaches.. and interputs her title schtick to wonder if that’s really grime, which he confirms and she confirms she’s there to kill em. Sasha isn’t impressed wondering why a general dosen’t have an army behind her.. but she gives a slasher smile, cuts down the trees and what not around her with no effort, and says “they slowed me down’> Bad.. ass.. she really is this universes wolverine.. and as such Sasha decides to super run away because Grimes in no shape to fight and she dosen’t want to get snkited in the kidneys.  The two go on the run, with Sasha once again understandably complaning about Grime’s lack of skills, even if she does keep up with her decently. Grime however, decides to push back this time and tells Sasha to at least admit the real reason she’s buried herself in training. Sasha TRIES to wave it off as just being about loosing the biggest fight of her life.. but Grime sees right through that bullshit.. she’s not mad about loosing the fight, any good warrior especailly grime himself knows one lost battle dosen’t mean the war.. she’s mad she lost Anne. That Anne defied her and that their friendship will never be the same again, if there’s one left to save. The two are stopped by a waterfall, and Sasha’s prepared to stand and fight.. while Grime refuses.. not out of cowardace or due to being out of shape but to protect HER. It really shows his saving her at the end of last season wasn’t just saving his best weapon.. he’s grown to genuinely care about her like the daughter he never had because he took one too many shots tot he sugarlumps in the arena. Here’s an honest reinactment of that. 

I still don’t know why he dove in crotch first. Sasha refuses though revealing she’s not just training to swallow her feelings.. she’s doing so she’s strong enough to protect the one friend she has left: Grime. I’m as shocked as Grime is honestly, as I genuinely thought she was just using him for her own benifit.. but she cares about the guy. It also adds a nice wrinkle to things as it’s one thing for her to leave an an asshole who needed a good pawn.. it’s another for the two to be every bit the family Anne and the Plantars are. She can’t just.. walk away from him and he can’t do the same. It’s not easy and it makes Sasha reforming that much harder as now BOTH must want to change , or Grime must do something really bad to her which is doubtful, to make changing a good prospect for Sasha.  Yunan naturally shows up to fight, rattling off her titles, the repettition helps, and preparing to gut them, but when she knocks Sasha down grime is actually ready to fight now he has something worth fighting for and the two unite. While Grime gets knocked down pretty quick Sasha’s training/emotoinal avoidance pays off and she takes yunan one on one even breaking one of her claws with her neat pink sword. It’s a quick, furious and goregiously animated fight and an utter delight to see. Sasha ends up loosing at the alst minute thanks to Yunan’s tail.. but Grime has recovered by then and sneaks up on her while Sasha stalls her by getting her to mention her titles again so Grime can push her off a cliff. Both recite their own titles, and Grime is back in the saddle again, the two now friends for life and Grime deciding fuck simply taking the Valley back. That’s thinking small.. he’s tired of working for someone else. He’s raising an army and TAKING Newtopia and thus the world.. after finishing his binge watch.. because while this is the old determined grime he’s also now the very dad new grime too. And because i’d do the same if I was an evil wannabe dictator bent on taking back what should’ve been mine. Sasha swears to anne that while she has a new path it’s not over. whelp this can’t end well.  Final Thoughts; 

Easily the best of the season so far. The episode deepens both sasha and grimes characters and while setting them up to once again meance where our heroes will be hanging their hat it does so intrestingly: instead of dominating the frogs because that’s how it’s done, it’s setting up a three way dance between our heroes, the newts who clearly have some caste system issues, and Grime who wants to take it all for himself, as well as putting our three lost humans up against each other eventually before they even reunite. I mean as synopsis show Anne and Marcy will be on good terms and what not.. but it’s also clear that this c an’t last with the way the newts are acting. War is a coming, and it’s going to be intense. But yeah the episode has stunning action and even better character work and Grime is the standout here: Taking what was a one dimensonal villian and not only giving him a humorous side with his downward spiral, but showing he genuinely cares for sasha and changing that dynamic for the better, while also giving him an intresting backstory that will likely get even more fleshed out as the season rolls on. This episode was well worth the wait and is just behind “Reunited” as the series best so far. Outstanding. And since the end of my previous review and final thoughts got swept away as it turned out, and I didn’t notice till this week the episodes, there was no ranking soooo... Toadcatcher Truck Stop Polly Anne Hunter Handy Anne Fort in the Road The Ballad of Hopidiah Plantar A Caravan Named Desire Quaraller’s Pass Next week Kermit the Frog is here fresh off Muppet’s Now!, which was pretty good by the by to do a voice, while we get the long awaited Gravity Falls Homage! Excitment! Until then like, subscribe, check here for my previous amphibia reviews and here for my most recent reviews looking at x-men evolution and until next time, courage. 

[suakkochibitarumarigami]

Random-ass Unpopular ML Opinion Post

Season 3 was great. And yes, it had more good episodes than bad ones. And whilst my opinions on which episodes were good do line up with everyone else's, my opinion in the more controversial - not objectively bad, just salt-inducing - episodes... Not so much.

In fact, there is only ONE truly bad - not simply flawed, but outright badly done - episode, that episode being Puppeteer 2, mostly due to the statue scene, the premise being a VERY obvious excuse for asset reuse, and due to Manon being an annoying little brat. That episode was THE dud of Season 3, like Gigantitan was THE dud of Season 2 and Copycat was THE dud of Season 1.

As for the other "salty" episodes? Okay, here we effing go.

Chameleon? Surprisingly well-done, set up the Lila subplot well, and the message at the end... Well, you guys certainly got all the mixed messages. What I got from it wasn't "Just let the bitch do whatever she damn pleases", but instead a "Lie-la is just going to lie herself into a corner eventually, so better play it defensively for the time being."

Animaestro? Honestly, with all the salt in this fandom, I see this episode as not an "ego stroke" or some shit, but rather venting. Some other person already summed it up best, so I'll just leave it at that. Though the Chloe subplot really bogged it down, that much I just HAVE to admit.

Onichan? Right, because Kagami is never allowed to experience feelings of jealousy, anger, or sadness, apparently. No emotions whatsoever, because Kagami's a goddamn paragon of stoicism, not just a normal teenage girl. /s

(Seriously though, you're acting like Kagami overreacting to Lila basically sticking all over Adrien is basically the end of the fucking world. I mean, I'd be pretty pissed off too if I saw some lying bitch sticking to my sorta-crush and they were VERY OBVIOUSLY UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THIS.)

As for Kagami's yandere tendencies as the titular villain? Blame Hawky's influence for that. With that all out of the way, the episode was otherwise stellar, if only for how it pretty much made Lila, as her usual civilian self, the real villain of the episode. Sorry, fanon!Lila lovers, but I like my liar gal as a magnificent villainous bitch rather than a walking "not evil just misunderstood" clichè, thank you very much. And the titular villain was fucking awesome both in terms of design AND powers, you have to admit at least that. Huge step-up from "generic armored superhuman with a sword fused to her hand", huh?

Battle of the Miraculous? It wasn't rushed or badly written, it merely had it's pacing all over the place and too much happening over the course of a single two-parter, but was otherwise decent, though it kinda did fail to top Heroes' Day (then again, that two-parter WAS a bit of a Tough Act to Follow, so...) . And as for Chloe's rather reprehensible act and going as far as to expose the identities of the "side heroes"... Well, I do hope she gets some karma for it, and I still have mixed feelings about Thomas' "we couldn't reseem Chloe" tweet, yet hearing everyone cry "muh character development" kinda makes me wonder if people just missed all the hints in "Miraculer" and "Startrain" that she's kinda sorta hit a roadblock with the words "Entitlement issues" plastered over it in bright red paint. Characters don't completely change after a single three-parter, people. Just remember that already.

Conclusion:

Stop saying that Season 3 was the worst solely because of a relatively small bunch of controversial episodes and a season finale that couldn't top the untoppable, for crying out loud.

[sindumpster]

If you don't mind refreshing my idiot brain's memory hole, what's a pseudo-mammal again? I remembered the term but not the rest of what you said before reeeeeeee

It was in context with my dragons, and tbh I’m kinda realizing now it’s a pretty dated possibly wrong term so internet does not give you a lot of sources for it (or the sources aren’t what I’m referring to). But in biology and math, when “pseudo” is tied to a word, it usually means “partial” (or sometimes “incomplete”), and for a “pseudo-mammal” it’s referring to an animal that is “partially” a mammal. They have some traits of a mammal, but there are also things mixed in that don’t match what you’d see with mammals (like say they had feathers, or a beak, or were cold blooded despite having fur and live birth--basically muddled and mixed traits but some of it is very mammal-like).

Like I borrowed the term from old-ass sources where it was used to refer to the evolution process of mammals, cuz they didn’t just pop up fully evolved and ready to go. It took a long time for something recognizable as a “mammal” to appear, and before that you had animals that were kinda...mixed. Though very much also considered their own thing, calling them “in-between” forms of reptiles and mammals is a dated classification, but I digress.

[[And also this next part is just me going off on my fantasy science bullshit so feel free to skip to the next dashed line if it makes no sense. Partly writing it for myself just cuz I have an excuse to lmao]]

----------

So for reference, mammals essentially evolved from reptiles, specifically Synapsids (like this guy that might look familiar which gave rise to Therapsids (which gave you these guys: 1 and 2) around 250-200 million years ago which gave you Cynodonts (predecessor to the mammals that evolved along dinosaurs, they’re late Therapsids). Thing with evolution though is that all those traits you associate with a modern day animal don’t suddenly pop up at once, instead those traits evolve in a “mosaic”. So like slowly placing pieces for a mosaic, through evolution those ancestral animals slowly gained different parts of the picture at different times. So esp with the Therapsid examples, you can kinda see some parts look more like a mammal, and some that seem more like a reptile, and it was not a rapid change.

With my dragons, the idea was that, evolutionarily, they hit that morphing stage  between reptiles and mammals and decided that worked well enough for them, and shot off into a new branch from there. Maybe there was some unforeseen advantage with keeping it, maybe they needed to focus their energy on evolving/mutating another pair of limbs (wings)--regardless they only evolved traits that aided them in survival, and didn’t bother with the gimmicks that didn’t really help them. Or maybe they did go full mammal and sorta stepped back, like how life came from the ocean, and whales decided “hey ocean kinda worked out for us, so let’s readapt for that” altho imo less likely because doing so would’ve probably disadvantaged dragons, and nature doesn’t select for things that makes survival as a species harder.

And if you wanna get really technical, this would probs then place dragons in an class of their own, or as surviving non-mammalian Therapsids (but most likely a branch that evolved from Therapsids and became their own thing like mammals did). This would mean that dragons are not mammals, reptiles, birds, or anything else. They are their own thing. But with ancestors popping up from that reptile-mammalian split.

(and aside but Gorgonopsia/Gorgonopsids are considered to have been at least partially warm-blooded, so the fantasy bullshit dragon clade prolly would’ve had to arise sometime before or around them)

------------

ANYWAYS, main reason I opted to group dragons like that is because they never fully screamed “reptile” at me, at least in my canon where they would need certain mammalian traits, or possibly bird-like features. But with the whole bat-wings and the way I drew their legs positioned under them (most reptiles have their legs to the side, like alligators/crocodiles and lizards), and the hair, and certain social behaviors that were very mammalian, it implied to me that there had to be something else in the mix, and all those things pointed to mammals.

This also tied in with Jake and his whole deal with the sweatshirt. Dude wears the thing because his temperature regulation is poor, but if he were a full-on reptile, that sweatshirt would do jack shit keeping him warm. Sweatshirts are designed to trap air inside and let the wearer warm it up with their own body heat. But if Jake was an ectotherm (cold-blooded), he wouldn’t have body heat, so the sweater wouldn’t do anything for him. And I wanted him to have some cold resistance because throwing him in the snow is funny, but also it would be funny if extended cold made him feel gross and sluggish (and hey, defeating a dragon with some very easy thermostat tinkering is also very funny). So he needed to have some level of endothermy (warm-blooded-ness), and the idea was to make it partial. So there you go, legit biological nonsense canon I created just because I wanted to justify my character wearing a sweatshirt.

That said, “partial endotherms” do exist in nature, and they’re called heterotherms. Literally just creatures that are “mixed” warm and cold-blooded, or can temperature regulate only under specific conditions. Animals like certain sharks, tuna, some arctic birds (in their feet), leatherback sea turtles (fins), certain insects, etc...

So it made sense to push that route with dragons, especially with having them tied to those part-reptile part-mammal ancestors where they just, kept a lot of the intermixed traits. And made sense to have that be their source of heterothermy too. Hence, they’d have enough of their own body heat to function in colder places/more varied seasons without completely slowing down or needing to hibernate like a reptile, they can adapt to grow more fur if they need to insulate themselves, but even then extended and severe cold will slow down their metabolisms (make them slow, lethargic, and kinda grumpy), and they still take to warmer climates better, and they will bask to raise their body temps when they can get away with it. (Also hey, maybe fire has a use for self-heating now too).

...and yeah this is a lot more extra than it needed to be, but I enjoy the “merging fantasy with biology” stuff and I do what I want, and idk maybe someone would find it interesting too. But in the most basic sense, pseudomammal was just meant to mean “not quite mammal, but not quite reptile either”, but it’s not a common term, especially now.

[samanthasmeyers]

How to Grow Your Sales with Shopify Landing Pages

Georgia sells boutique hot sauces online and she’s starting to get some traction.

With five years of marketing experience under her belt, she launched her store on Shopify as a side hustle. It’s blown up since then, allowing Georgia to turn peppery products into her full-time gig.

To manage growing demand, she relied on an ecomm agency that promised her 7X ROAS. But the $3,000 monthly retainer didn’t make sense, especially since she wasn’t even close to matching that in ad spend.

So, Georgia set out to do some research on her own. She’s smart, and she’s no stranger to marketing. That’s when she discovered the secret sauce to scaling her ecommerce business.

It wasn’t sriracha. It was landing pages.

Georgia knows you don’t need to be a spice savant to creating marketing campaigns that bring the heat—you just need to know what converts. Read on to learn how Shopify landing pages can help you transform your ecomm sales from mild to five-alarm hot.

Why Use Landing Pages for Shopify?

Tons of companies that sell on Shopify send traffic from their paid campaigns directly to product pages on their website. And, sure, that works well enough for some of ’em. After all, your site gives people a high-level overview of your product offering that landing pages usually don’t.

But the reality is that if you’re not using landing pages to prime visitors for purchase, you’re not converting to your potential.

Let’s say you’re running a seasonal campaign around Black Friday. You’ve got all your Facebook ads set up and ready to go. You hit the red launch button, and… oh no. Your relevance score is crying for help because you’re sending people who clicked a Black Friday ad to a generic product page.

Not only that, but you’re creating an awful experience for visitors. The place they wound up doesn’t match the ad that they clicked. They’re confused, maybe even frustrated. You can kiss that conversion goodbye.

Now, consider the benefits of sending your traffic to a dedicated landing page before they hit your online store:

1. You can get specific with your target audience

Pushing shoppers to a run-of-the-mill product page isn’t ideal since the page probably wasn’t designed to address their needs specifically. The best way to drive ecommerce sales is by pairing custom landing pages with highly targeted ads or emails to help you reach a specific audience at a specific time with a specific offer, encouraging them to take a specific action.

Specificity converts.

2. You can get higher conversion rates by A/B testing

The average ecommerce site in the United States converted at 2.6% last year. Worldwide, that percentage is only slightly higher at 4.3%. Not bad, but also not awesome.

Landing pages let you perform A/B testing at a level of granularity that most ecomm platforms don’t allow, helping you validate their effectiveness and optimize as you go. By tweaking your messaging and tinkering with design elements, you can squeeze even more conversions outta your campaigns.

3. You can deliver a customized brand experience

The product pages that come pre-packaged with themes on ecommerce platforms are meant to be modified to suit your brand, but most businesses just add their content and start sending traffic. That means lots of ecomm brands show up the same, with product pages that lack distinguishing features or meaningful detail.

With landing pages, you can provide a truly customized brand experience before visitors even hit your website—so once they do, they’ll be ready to buy.

4. You can build and launch with less time and money

We’ll be the first to admit there are plenty of head-turning product pages out there. The trouble is that most of these pages have been custom-built by specialized teams who speak Liquid code—and that’s reflected in their cost.

Then there’s the time commitment. Say you’ve decided not to run a Valentine’s Day campaign, but then you have a last-minute change of heart. Your dev won’t appreciate your call at 3 am, asking ’em to put together a product page. (And your designer, copywriter, and other team members won’t be throwing you a party, either.)

5. You can keep visitors focused on making a purchase

Most product pages come with tons of distractions: site navigation, links out to reviews, multiple calls to action. There are plenty of ways for visitors to wander off in the midst of making a purchase.

On the other hand, your landing page is totally laser-focused on getting people to convert. Fewer distractions mean lower bounce rates, which means more sales.

Building Your Shopify Landing Page: Best Practices

Best practices for Shopify landing pages are a lot like any other landing page best practices: message match, context of use, that sorta thing. Still, there are some specific things you can do on your Shopify pages that’ll give them that extra oomph.

Here are some tips to keep in mind while you’re building your Shopify landing page:

Sell the benefits, not the features. Converting in ecomm is all about the benefits of the product. How does it improve your target customer’s life? Think through all of the potential benefits of your product (even the obscure, less tangible ones) and make sure you’re highlighting them on your landing page.

Make it look amazing. Before your audience reads a single word of copy, their emotional response will be to the visuals of your page. Be sure to wow them with your design.

Stun ’em with a video. If it makes sense for your brand, also consider using video on your landing page. Marketers who include videos in their campaigns often see conversion rate bumps of 34%—and with loads of other benefits, it’s a wonder more brands aren’t getting out their camcorders.

Use psychic triggers. Familiarize yourself with concepts like social proof and scarcity. For example, you might wanna include messaging around time-based (“only for the next 24 hours”) or product-based (“only 10 left”) scarcity to drive landing page conversions.

Stay relevant by launching fast. The timing of your ecomm campaigns is huge. No one wants to hear about your New Year’s sale in February, so get crackin’ on those landing pages and launch your next campaign yesterday.

Shopify Landing Page Examples

Here are three examples of Shopify landing pages that were handcrafted by Unbounce customers.

1. Doctor + Daughter

Doctor + Daughter is a cosmetics line made with organic ingredients. You wouldn’t know it by looking at their landing page, but the business behind the brand is actually The Lee Clinic.

One quick look at their website is all it takes to understand why this landing page is vital to their marketing. The homepage does a lot of things—explains who the company is, where they’re located—but there’s no obvious way to find and purchase their products.

Let’s dig a little deeper and take a look at The Lee Clinic’s product list page.

Sending traffic to this page presents obstacles, too. The copy doesn’t really tell us all that much about the benefits of the product. What’s driving me to learn more and buy?

Even the individual product pages bury lots of key information within collapsing bullet points, making it tough for visitors to find out what the products do or how to use them. And while these pages look pretty slick, most ecomm marketers could spot ’em as Shopify templates.

Imagine you get a promotional email from The Lee Clinic advertising a site-wide discount. You click the link and find yourself on the page with their list of products, or even one of the specific product pages. What do you think would do a better job of getting you to buy—that, or this landing page?

The Lee Clinic’s landing page (built by Webistry) does a fantastic job of summarizing the product benefits in a super attractive way. The design isn’t just gorgeous—it’s congruent. Clean. Simple. Professional and eye-catching. Really, it’s just a treat to look at.

And check this out:

This clever section asks visitors what their main skincare concern is, then presents them with a product designed to address that very issue. The Lee Clinic is tying the customer problem directly to their solution. (And this technique can work like magic when you’re retargeting visitors later on down the funnel.)

Also, notice the add-to-cart slide-in on the right-hand side of the page. This minimizes the steps to checkout, making the buyer journey faster, simpler, and smoother. There’s no redirecting to the website, so the entire checkout process can be completed within the landing page. Sweet.

Ready to run email marketing campaigns that’ll blow your subscribers’ socks off? It’s easy—just add landing pages to the mix. Check out how you can drive more email sales by sending your shoppers to dedicated post-click landing pages.

2. Nanor Collection

Nanor Collection sells long-lasting luxury candles, which is to say they burn real slow. If you’re planning a romantic evening (or several, consecutively), these candles are pour vous.

They’ve got an awesome landing page (another from Webistry) that does a great job of showing off their product in an attractive way. It’s sexy. Slick. Simple. An alluring invitation, if I were so inclined.

And look at how the product is showcased here.

Yes, it’s gorgeous and jam-packed with persuasion elements, but that’s only half of it. It sustains the shopper’s experience. It lets them remain on the page, adding items to their cart without ever having to leave. Compare that with the online store on their site, where the user would need to click out and navigate through multiple pages to achieve the same objective. 

It’s a great landing page, right? So it’ll come as no surprise to learn it’s converting at a healthy 5.6%.

Let’s compare it with another one of their pages specifically targeting Mother’s Day shoppers. But before I reveal the conversion rate of this one, take a closer look:

Visually, there’s not a huge difference between the two pages. The real change is in the copy: the general landing page highlights a product feature (they’re “long-lasting”) while the Mother’s Day page speaks to the benefit customers can derive from that feature (making your partner feel special with an awesome gift).

The Mother’s Day page has some other things working in its favor. There’s a site-wide discount with an established deadline, plus messaging that indicates there might not be enough of these candles to go around (“while supplies last”). It does a good job of establishing scarcity.

So, which do you think did better?

The Mother’s Day page is converting at almost 15%, essentially turning 3X more visitors into customers than the general landing page. It just goes to show: benefits sell way better than features.

3. DIFF Eyewear

DIFF Eyewear is an eyeglass ecomm that gives up a chunk of their revenue in support of charitable initiatives, helping provide glasses, eye exams, and surgeries to people in need.

The brand has a great-looking website, but like lots of storefronts, it has a ton of elements that distract visitors from making a purchase. There are all those menu items. Multiple calls to action. Different features and incentives like blue light lenses, buy-one-get-one, and philanthropy.

Compare the unfocused (because glasses—get it?) experience of their website with that of this mobile landing page:

Can you see the difference? Here, DIFF tilts its messaging on its head. The main site really focuses on their humanitarianism, and that’s great—it’s what their brand is all about. But here, the copy is all about the value to the customer. There’s no mention of charity. It’s all about making the sale based on the benefits of the product.

Getting Started with Shopify Landing Pages

Whether you’re putting together a business-as-usual campaign or creating something special for an upcoming promotion, you’ve got urgent deadlines that you’ve absolutely gotta hit. That means you need to be able to get slick, super targeted pages up fast.

Forget custom coding. Armed with a powerful landing page builder (like Unbounce), you can adjust everything like Neo in The Matrix—drag, drop, and publish. And with more than a hundred quick-start templates, you can get going right this minute.

from Marketing https://unbounce.com/conversion-rate-optimization/shopify-landing-pages/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[fyompi]

Remembering Final Fantasy X-2

It’s hard to assess whether to call X-2 “good,” but if I did, I wouldn’t mean “good” in the most traditional sense. The game is an unnecessary sequel to one of the best Japanese role-playing games ever made, and turns a somber, existential, occultist storyline into an upbeat comedy. 

What’s weird is that I don’t dislike this at all. Final Fantasy games have always been funny, and have arguably relied more on their world building than actual plot. They’re visually super interesting. Their character and monster designs are discussed more now than anything that actually happens in them. 

Maybe somebody from Enix realized this, for better or worse. There’s nothing about the structure and framework of the Final Fantasy series that limits them to being strictly dramas. Recognizing that fact made the existence of a comedy entry sort of an inevitability. 

Final Fantasy X-2 is effectively a magical girl anime. A genre of anime that is notably, and characteristically created for girls. Transformation sequences, in which a teenage female character changes outfits from regular surface-level Earthling attire, to a vibrant and glittery superhero popstar, is a mainstay in the genre. Usually, these shows were divided into two segments: one depicting the main character’s day-to-day “normal” life, like a regular sitcom, and then later changing into an action fantasy show for like five minutes. The bulk of the shows had little to do with the fighting, and more to do with the lives of the characters. Over many seasons, you see this character grow up, make friends, go on dates, have her heart broken, and sometimes even have kids. It makes the serious aspects of the show feel heavier, once you’ve gotten to know this person. 

I love these shows. Sailor Moon is one of the best looking animated television shows ever made. Every frame is a work of art, and every person I know who grew up enjoying it has amazing fashion sense today. 

Taking the already pretty flamboyant, and visually-unorthodox world of Final Fantasy, and turning into a magical girl anime makes a ton of sense, despite it being in the same world as something so drastically different. Tidus, the main character from Final Fantasy X, was already modeled after a real world Japanese pop star from the nineties, and Tetsuya Nomura’s fashion sense might be the most striking aspect of the series. It’s a series dripping in glitzy, futuristic visual design. The influence these games have had on my personal taste in art can’t be understated. 

I would even go as far as to say, watching my cousins play Final Fantasy X-2 is the most critical reason I have any interest in fashion today. Which might be hard to imagine for some, given how incredible gauche some of the outfits can be in this game. But to me, playing these games with other people felt like watching the Met Gala; you bicker with your friends at the sight of every new outfit, whether it’s beautiful or horrendous, and slowly the line dividing the two begins to fade into abstraction. That’s how I felt looking at all the different outfits in Final Fantasy X-2 as a child. I understood why fashion is fun, and realized that girls my age were smarter than I was giving them credit for. 

Like a year later, I went to my friend’s birthday party and met his older cousins who were also into Final Fantasy, and I told them that Final Fantasy X-2 was my favorite game in the series.  They all proceeded to yell at me for ten straight minutes about how awful it was. I didn’t tell them that I had never actually played the game, only looked at it, and decided that it was my favorite thing to look at. I remember very vividly, one of them was wearing smokey eyeliner, and I really liked looking at him too. Something about his eyeliner made me think he’d appreciate X-2 more than he did, and I was disappointed when he complained about the lack of plot, and how it “ruined” his favorite entry in the series. I didn’t tell them that I liked the game because of the outfits because I was too embarrassed to, so instead I told them the battle system was really good, which I had heard was the case, from people who’d actually played it. One nodded and said “yeah, that battle system is pretty freaking good. You ever played  F. F. 2 though?” 

“No.” “2’s got an even better battle system. If you like that kinda stuff you gotta play that game.”

He meant Final Fantasy 4, released in America as Final Fantasy 2. I was a senior in high school when I realized that’s what he meant. When he had told me though, I didn’t want to play either, because those games weren’t three-dimensional, and they didn’t have voice acting, and they didn’t have cute outfits like X-2 did. 

My appreciation for the series wasn’t as “deep” as theirs but the world captured me just the same. That same year, I had played Kingdom Hearts 2, and then Kingdom Hearts 1, and decided Kingdom Hearts 2 was the better game because you got to play as Roxas, who has objectively better hair than Sora. I played on Easy, and never equipped any items or abilities to my character because I didn’t like looking at the menus, and didn’t like reading tutorials. I just wanted to see the world, I didn’t really care about what was really going on in it. It was absolutely impossible, playing it this way. 

I couldn’t relate when the boys at the party were bragging about beating Kingdom Hearts 1 on level 1, or beating Riku first-try, or playing through the Japanese-exclusive Kingdom Hearts 2: Final Mix, because it had a “critical mode” which was harder than the hardest difficulty in the American release of the game. All of this was really strange to me, and I felt really stupid that I couldn’t ever imagine being that good at a videogame. That was also the first moment it occurred to me that calling a game I’ve never played “my favorite game” was sorta fraud-behavior. They lived in these games, and I was a tourist. I realized that most of the people who played, and enjoyed Final Fantasy X enough to both complete it, and buy it’s sequel, are people like them. The game did not cater to these people. They later took me to their computer desk and had me watch five back-to-back episodes of Red vs. Blue on youtube. I couldn’t follow any of what was going on in any episode. 

Eventually, I got around to playing Final Fantasy X-2, and the battle system was as good as everybody told me it would be. It’s too good. It’s sometimes so good, that I forget how shallow the rest of the game is. It’s so good that it makes me hate how little the game focuses on it. 

A simple RPG with a tight battle system, and little story, is fine by me. Dragon Quest games are incredibly straightforward, in the best way possible. The substance of the battles, and the quaintness of the adventure, makes every game incredibly charming. Final Fantasy X-2 unfortunately, tries to add substance where there is none, by forcing the player to complete very boring mini-games after every story advancement. This is the director’s way of constantly reminding the player of the upbeat, and non-serious tone of the game. But instead, these sequences are wastes of time, that feel like distractions, from the empty storyline. They’re also so difficult to watch in 2019.

I don’t need to be distracted though, because I don’t mind a jrpg that isn’t an epic. I just want a game that’s about something. If the gameplay was only traversing the world, and honing the battle system, that would be enough for me. But instead, it becomes clear to me early on that the team didn’t know who to cater to. The primary audience for magical girl anime might be turned off by the blatant objectification of the three main characters, and the primarily male audience of Final Fantasy don’t seem to want an electric popist sitcom to be their non-plot. 

On top of that, the voice acting is a lot worse than I remember, and the Playstation 2 doesn’t really have the hardware to adequately depict X-2’s nautical sci-fi fashion, except in fully CGI cutscenes, which are incredibly rare in this game. And in the few CGI cutscenes that do exist, the directors get to choose what outfits the characters are in, which aren’t the outfits I would ever choose, because they aren’t the Black Mage outfits. The outfits they wear in the box-art are the outfits they wear in every CGI cutscene. Every other outfit is limited to the blocky in-game models. I can’t even find high definition concept art of these outfits. It’s a shame, because some of them are amazing. 

On top of that, I don’t actually get to know these characters well. The character progression, which made X amazing, and made shows like Sailor Moon substantive, isn’t there. For all the bells and whistles they put in the game, nothing actually matters. Yuna is upbeat and cute, Rikku is young and adhd, and Paine is goth. That’s really it, for the whole game. The script is very rarely funny enough to get away with such shallow characters. It loses its charm incredibly quickly. 

That depleting likability is a big issue when the game’s substance comes in its side quests. This game is a nightmare to 100% complete, and since the primary collectibles are the outfits, the game really makes you feel like a loser when you miss anything. The most interesting part of the game is hidden behind the worst parts, and made me realize how privileged I was to have my cousin do all that for me, and let me see the good parts. 

So, I begrudgingly understand, and agree with the criticism, of a game so tailor-made to my specific taste. I wish I could recommend it to people, but I don’t know anybody with the attention span required to make this game worthwhile. What’s especially sad is the fact that, if this game were a lot better, it might have successfully opened the creative gates of Final Fantasy games to their audience. To this day, Americans still seem to think that a jrpg’s quality is defined by the plot alone. There’s so much more going on with the genre, that can be attributed to many different types of experiences, and unfortunately, Final Fantasy X-2 is far from an adequate example of this. 

[isobel-thorm]

About Me Game

tagged by: @deputymaxwell

1. how tall are you? 5′ 7″’

2. what color and style is your hair? Blondish brown, shoulder length, forever-fried looking waves on the bottom. I need to get a haircut and highlights soon 

3. what color are your eyes? Blue-Grey

4. do you wear glasses? Used to as a kid, but not anymore.

5. do you wear braces? Suffered through them for three years. Now I just have the permanent retainer from Hell. 

6. what’s your fashion sense? Jeans and a tank top with either an open button-up shirt or a hoodie over it. 

7. full name? Sarah Christine.

8. when were you born? February 25th

9. where are you from and where do you live now? Long Island, NY.  Still live in the same house and town I grew up in. I hate it. 

10. what school do you go to? Last place I physically attended was SUNY Oswego.  “Physically’ sounds weird in hindsight so I also took an online class at Pace before I realized I couldn’t afford any more. 

11. what kind of student are you? The student that people who wait until the last minute to do papers hate. I was always the one who turned in assignments on time compared to all my friends. One year my apartmentmates hated me because they were scrambling to finish up stuff for finals week and I had been done for 5+ days and was just hanging out all day.  That said, I did slack off plenty. Barely ever studied. A- student in my field, C+ for most of the other gen ed stuff. 

12. do you like school? Mixed feelings. Mostly liked, but that was really only because I had the college experience where my friends/classmates were like a family to me, and as I kind of mentioned, my college friends are really the only ones who pay attention to my life anymore and I no longer have easy access to them in person, which is awful. So I loved it for that. 

13. favorite subject? English and Psychology

14. favorite tv shows? Lucifer, Sleepy Hollow seasons 1-3 before it got Bad, White Collar, Lost, Longmire, The Sniffer

15. favorite movie? (deep breath) The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, Dear Frankie, Man from UNCLE, The Avengers, Thor, 3:10 to Yuma, Miss Congeniality, Austenland and many, many more. 

16. favorite book? Good Omens

18. favorite past time? Writing, binging videogames.

19. do you have regrets? Many. 

20. dream job? Forever changing. Art teacher, interior designer, doggie day care owner, editor 

21. would you ever like to be married? Yes, but considering I’m three years away from being 30 and haven’t had a relationship I’ve basically accepted it ain’t gonna happen and I’m gonna die alone. 

22. would you like kids? Maybe. 

23. how many? 1 or 2 maximum. 

24. do you like shopping? Yes, unless it’s for clothing. Fuck clothes shopping. 

25. what countries have you visited? Haven’t left the U.S. Closest thing is the time I went to the U.S Virgin Islands. 

26. scariest nightmare you have ever had? Too many to list. My imagination was very unkind to my younger self in that regard. 

27. any enemies? My childhood best friend. 

28. any significant other? Nooope. 

29. do you believe in miracles? Kinda sorta??

30. how are you? Awful and barely holding it together, thanks for asking. 

I tag: ALL Y’ALL

[eyeodyssey]

Film Production Log #3

A frame from “The Death Of A Home″. What year is this? It’s been a long time coming that I finally got around to writing another one of these things. It’s three months into 2019 already and I hardly even noticed, made a rude awakening when I looked to the calendar to see that it went from 28 back to 1. With all that, it hit me that I hardly wrote about the progression of any of my current film projects in that period of time. I thought I had a rough idea of how the passage of time worked, as it turns out I know as little about a concept as abstract as time as I do about every other thing in life that defies explanation. There’s a reason why I simultaneously dread everything and nothing after all. I’ve written through many variants of this first paragraph beforehand, each draft starting off with the same “long time coming” comment, which gained further relevancy with each rewrite. Let’s go and cut this ongoing habit before it goes beyond simple procrastination into flat out absurdity.

A frame from “The Death Of A Home″. Like mentioned with the second production log, we spent most of the December of 2018 haphazardly preparing a forced move that we had to undergo with the sudden gentrification of our apartment at the time. This wasn’t the first time I faced the systematic Kafkaesque horror of gentrification. I was pissed, to say the least, and I did the only thing I could do, I documented it. With The Death Of A Home as it is currently, all the footage from the move itself has been compiled and made into a rough cut, adding up to my first proper feature length film at an hour and 12 minutes. The film is comprised of long shots, with scenes ranging from a crew of biohazard workers cleaning the basement of a black mold infestation that was never reported to the tenants to a sequence where long kept hand-painted furniture is forcibly discarded (tossed down a staircase into the back lot to lead to a rain of multicolored paint shards). The whole film will also be accompanied by a harsh noise soundtrack, I mostly have Merzbow stuff playing throughout as a placeholder. I’ll be shooting on the side some abstract visual sequences for the documentary, communicating certain details of our story that weren’t captured on film. I have a lot of ideas brewing for the mixed media techniques I could use for creating these images in a live action format, specifically ones that return to the sort of trash bag special effects that I used in my prior film concerning the subject of gentrification, Weightless Bird In A Falling Cage. Setting foot in the new apartment, the first thing we came to notice was the absolutely vacant house next to us. The building was completely abandoned with electricity still hooked up, looked like no one set foot there in years. Having it face the bedroom every day, with our constant visual subjection and time to contemplate we came to the conclusion that something was gonna happen to the building at some point. It was clearly the middle child to an estate that left it to rot. Just in time for when we wrapped up unboxing everything, the building caught fire. At first I didn’t pay much mind to the sound of sirens driving through (it’s an Atlanta custom). It eventually hit me that something wasn’t quite right when I looked to one of the windows to see bright red, Suspiria technicolor light shining through.

A frame from “Burning Fragments: Mode 3 - Winter 2019″. Did I go out to have a look? Of course, so did the rest of the neighborhood. Made an interesting meet your neighbor type of gathering, to say the least. I also brought my camera with me, and I came back with a metaphorical stack of raw footage along with a slow-cooked pair of lungs, the film is more important though. From that raw footage, I got the visual edit for the short Burning Fragments, a part of my seasonal “Mode” series that was first kicked off by Hard Drive and continued by my currently unreleased Factory Dreams. Burning Fragments is a montage of morbidly humbling sequences, from a roof visibly caving in through the smoking windows to medical staff cautiously carting out a stretcher, prepared for the worst case scenario. No one came out injured luckily, though I don’t mention that in the film (to keep up the haunting atmosphere). Power was cut to the building, the fire was put out and the street stunk of smoke for the next month. I thought it smelt like a smoked rib, one neighbor of ours said it smelt exactly like pot smoke.

A frame from “Factory Dreams: Mode 2 - Fall 2018″. Right around there was where we thought the story would end, but several days later the building went back up again. This time around I went to one of the firefighters to ask what started the fire in the first place. As it turned out this second eruption was from the ongoing work of someone who had a great disdain to a singular sofa in the abandoned building. The first fire was started off by the arsonist setting this certain sofa aflame, and the guy returned to the scene of the crime to incinerate it for good. Our friendly neighborhood sofa arsonist is still on the run to this day. Going into rapid-fire mode, some other noteworthy moments of the year so far include: OS updating, film editor street fighting, more OS updating, cool experimental film screenings (as seen in my documentary Moonlight Tunnel), one last OS update for good measure and discovering the new OS is as thought out as a tumble down a staircase.

Kafka’s Supermarket sorta ended up bunched between everything, seeing one quick, sporadic development at a time. The issue with actors still stands, gotta track down some people for the film to act in those pesky performed segments. It all goes smoothly until you’ve gotta spend the time and physical resources of other living, fleshy beings into your freaky unscripted cinematic daydreams. Around the end of February, I collaborated with local collage artists Steven and Cassi Cline to write the dialogue for the film, collage literature style. We took several different approaches when it came to fully fleshing things out, some were done as experimental writing games while others were the more familiar cut n paste technique. The script took a wide variety of resources, including the FBI documents printed from the internet archive, the prologue of a Georges Bataille philosophical text and a book on nuclear weapons. I was largely the supplier when it came to the process, while I do visual collage stuff often I’m less of a writer (both letter by letter and cut up source by cut up source). Readings of the literary collages will be interspersed throughout the film with an announcer who seems completely detached from the surreal nature of the scenes he describes. Burroughs’ approach for writing Naked Lunch aside, the primary source of inspiration for this detail comes from my memories of a radio clock that we had during my childhood. I would tune through channels with it searching for classical music, but most often I’d find news stations. Not knowing anything about politics at the time (being 5 to 6 years old and all), the nature of what was being discussed was completely alien to me. With how Kafka’s Supermarket is focused on the nightmarish distortion of everyday life in capitalist America, I felt it was necessary to recreate the atmosphere of those broadcasts that confused me all those many years ago. One detail that left the production hung for a significant amount of time, as minuscule as it may seem, was the masks the actors would be wearing. The visual style of Kafka’s Supermarket was adapted from my 2017 zine What Brought Me To This Point, an experiment in nihilistic writing that focuses on the mental state of a man with prosopagnosia and a non-specified mental illness. My general understanding of prosopagnosia at the time was admittedly limited, I had just heard of a condition where someone couldn’t recognize faces and something about the idea creatively resonated. From this, all the characters were designed with the same basic facial template, prioritizing the bare essentials of the human face with an emphasis on the uncanny. Kafka’s Supermarket further branches out this aesthetic in using it as a wider embodiment of the lack of individual personality in a capitalist state, where everything is selling to a set of categorized markets that represent the general populace.

A frame from “Kafka’s Supermarket”. The thing is, human heads aren’t structured like these figures I was drawing. I spent an absurdly long time contemplating how exactly I could recreate the look of these characters not only with a budget but with a budget without having it look too “store-bought” in a way. The main catch was I was going by realism and not surrealism. At that point, I briefly lost sight of what exactly I was doing. We all make mistakes. I brooded on how I could convincingly recreate an abstract illustration. It took until I started reading the screenplays of Kōbō Abe that sense hit me again when I questioned how it would be done in a theater production. That was when I remember that I’m making a non-narrative experimental film, not something like a superhero fan film where a certain level of suspension of disbelief is expected. Since then I plotted out an alternative that’s simultaneously more affordable than anything I was theorizing beforehand while also being more surreal and true to the theories and atmosphere behind Kafka’s Supermarket (and even it’s predecessor, What Brought Me To This Point). Since then I’ve found myself further experimenting with the fusion of film and theater, specifically the use of minimal props and images to convey a greater concept. I’ll be reposting cast calls for actors through the next several days, hoping for the best while I also simultaneously pester a nearby grocery store for permission to shoot a short sequence on their property. Productions like this are the ones that leave me realizing the oxymoronic nature in pursuing capitalist chains about the production of strictly anti-capitalist cinematic rhetoric.

A frame from “Empire Of Madness: A Wilderness Within Hell 2″. While juggling well more than a handful of personal projects (all the films mentioned earlier, a second chapter of Iron Logs and a harsh noise album experiment), I also convinced myself that I can get back into animation again. I was publicly tiptoeing around the idea of a second Wilderness Within Hell film for a while, and now it seems that it will likely be a thing with Empire Of Madness. It’s not really a direct sequel as much as it is a continuation of the style that was first started with Madhouse Mitchel. Set in the same age of industrial totalitarian inferno as Madhouse Mitchel, Empire Of Madness follows the life of Prometheus after his divine punishment for giving mankind knowledge. Having finally passed physical torture in the complete separation of his physical body, Prometheus wanders the Earth as an anomalous figure that assembles itself in a seemingly manufactured, mechanical nature. With pieces of his blood and flesh inherited by every man and woman with his given wisdom, he is inconsequently responsible for a curse put on all of humanity that destines man to collapse in paranoia and violence. Prometheus is shunned by everyone who crosses his path, seeing him as a sickly demon. Prometheus comes to realize that aside from his physical torture, the true act of divine punishment enacted on him will be the experience of having his own creation slowly destroy itself while it collectively tries to kill him.

A frame from “Empire Of Madness: A Wilderness Within Hell 2″. I’m simultaneously writing the film’s screenplay while I draw certain visual intensive scenes. Like I mentioned I’m still a bit rough around the edges with writing, so for this phase of production, I’ll actively study Kōbō Abe’s scripts and also the screenplays to an Akira Kurosawa film and Battleship Potemkin. I’ll still in a way aim more to minimalism with how certain things play out, with this series’ influences in Japanese guro art it’s more inclined to create a certain nightmarish atmosphere above all else. While Madhouse was largely anti-systemic rage, this film leans more to bleak existentialism. Bits of the soundtrack are already recorded, the main theme can currently be heard here. That’s about all I have to write for now. Now to wait another four months until I post anything text based on here again.

[agl03]

1 Ok. So...I'm someone that profoundly disliked the Framework plot in regards to Fitz. He is literally my fave character in the MCU and I think that the way he was treated in there (no by Aida, etc) but by the writers was absolutely cruel. Every other character had the chance of redemption, but for him it was just pain and more trauma. With every other character you could see who they really were, but with Fitz not even a shadow. I literally had to take my eyes of the tv half the time because it

2 made me physically sick. For me the last scene with Fritz and Jemma was almost unbearable. I study screenwriting and a scene in which you take two characters so loved, with a relationship so important and you put them trough something that sick and don’t give them the chance of Catharsis is just not well written, they are reaping horrible consequences that they don’t deserve without nothing to be gained. I remember being really upset that not even the season finale gave us any sort of closure

3 not even a scene where FS sorta clear the air. When I knew that The Doctor was gonna be in 5x14 I was very nervous, but it occurred to me that maybe the writers would use that chance to give Fitz a win, to triumph over him in a way he was robbed of last season. But now reading the Hypable hints I’m getting really anxious. I feel like the writers are just gonna pile torture over torture and leave me, and many others fans, with a really ugly feeling. The “ uniquely intimate, uniquely painful…”

drawing of blood makes me recoil and if they give more reasons to make Fitz feel disgusted of himself and to put strain into FS and not resolve anything I don’t know what I will do. Sorry for any mistakes, English is not my first language. And sorry for the excess of emotions, is just that the Fritz thing really triggers me in ways that nothing fictional ever had. Thank you so much 

Hi Anon,

I have a love hate relationship with the Framework to this day.  I know very well how hard it was on some fans and for Fitzsimmons fans in particular.  My ask box got the brunt of it.  Had it gone down how I suspect it was originally planned it wouldn’t have been nearly as bad.   But, it is what it is.   I do think the writers realized too late AKA after they’d wrapped, that they did indeed go too far with Fitzsimmons in there and then ran out of the real estate they needed to wrap it up properly.

So first and foremost take care of yourself.  As much as I want people to watch live and boost ratings, if you are worried its going to be too hard to watch or upset you, then wait til after.  Have a trusted friend who has watched it warn you if you have too.   

Next, it’s been awhile since Hypable has done an article this ‘scary’ for lack of a better word.  And most of the time she’ll blow stuff up bigger than it really is and this is all influenced by her personal character preferences.  She is just like any other fan and has her favorites.  Also the more riled up the article makes fans the more clicks it gets, which is what its for.  So take the hype with a grain of salt.

My thought all along is that they would bring The Doctor back into play like this in order to help Fitz heal as well.   And I still think that will happen.  Its going to be painful at times but I do think that Fitz and Fitzsimmons will get the upper hand in the very end.  They’ll definitely be battered physically and emotionally but they will still be together.  They need to wrap up this arc in order to make room for the others that need to come.  IE Fitzsimmons/Deke and whyever the heck lead to Dove filming with them at the end of her run.  

There will be blood (and other stuff)

Blood is hardly an unusual sight on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. — this is a show that has gleefully ripped out eyeballs and chopped off its main character’s hand on screen, after all. But what is unusual in “The Devil Complex” is who winds up drawing blood from whom, and why. The circumstances this week are uniquely intimate, uniquely painful… and designed to leave very memorable scars.

This bit might not even apply to Fitzsimmons.  If it does it could mean they discover Deke’s connection to them or the Baby Bomb is dropped as a result. For example if one of Fitzsimmons or even Deke is severely injured then they could donate blood to save the other.  However,  here are three characters in the mix that have something special about their blood that make much bigger targets for this in my eyes.  Daisy, Coulson (Gh), and Creel (they set that up back in season 3 and have yet to fully pay it off).  So I think Hale and/or Ruby will be doing the drawing.  If this is the case especially if its Daisy or Coulson, I don’t think the blood is given willingly..  And for the record me and needles…yeah not so much.  

I really hope this helps.

[artdjgblog]

​Innerview: Pete Dulin / Present Magazine​

November 2010

Poster: DJG Design

Note: Interview about a forthcoming art exhibition.

01) How has your art/design evolved (if it has) over the past few years?

It’s easier for an outsider or critic to answer this question, somebody who isn’t dragging around the body of work yet somewhat familiar. Although, I do feel an artist, a human in general, should always be growing/evolving. So, I believe I’m doing this and with an infinite back lot in reserve for improvement. Many milk the same cow over and over and this truly works for a few. However, I’m a different person every day, sometimes several different ones in one day. And I appreciate the timeline of the time spent down here to see how all of this builds. Looking and processing it mentally or physically in my documentation, there is something brewing. Even if I am still cave painting compared to most.

One also has to keep in check that everything has been done under the sun. But, one is their own voice and I listen to the one thumping at me on the inside and out. I get thumped a lot. That’s exciting and challenging. My timeline’s evolution might fit snug into an eye lash plot for the amount spent here. As in, you can probably put me in my artistic place. But, personally I’ve always got a new flavor of milk in mind. It’s like the height measurements climbing behind the door in Grandma’s back bedroom. Same vessel, different day. There’s growth as well as the things that have been wired since day one. Other than that, I don’t know. I’m always pushing and plowing for me, trying to figure me out. Obviously, something isn’t clicking with me elsewhere or I wouldn’t be doing this. Same goes with anyone doing anything. But, the undercurrent treat is when others find out it’s for them too, when they discover something that sparks an evolve in figuring themselves out. That is pretty rewarding stuff. 0​2) If you could go back and re-do one piece from early in your career, what would it be and what would you change? I mentioned that I value a timeline, but I’m not much for going back for a redo. Especially with something like art. I’d rather just make more art now. If there are mistakes or doubts in the look-back then they are part of the process, equal parts learning, artistic and life. I guess if I could go back and throw a change-up I’d try to save more money and make more connections, maybe work harder. But, that’s just stuff I can work better at in the now. And I never make money. Of course, there are always things told to me after the fact, and from a fresh set of eyes/mind, like, “Ya know, that poster art looks dirty! You sly devil! Ha!” Oops, I never intended that to happen (red in the face). To go back and redo it, why bother? It is what it is and it was born out of the creative process at that moment. It looked like a friendly face to me. It was also a poster and street expiration is limited. Yet, the stories and life after that expiration can continue. It’s a great laugh and better story now. And, I received the bobcat paw in the poster from a late uncle, so it’s a little tribute. Anyway, I love what others get out of things and how different people can perceive different things out of the same thing. Then, there are those days I look at something I made earlier on in my so-called career, even things made yesterday, and I’ll see something completely different or I’ll not be sure why I did it that way or what state of mind I was in. In the end, I did it and so it’s done and I’m fine with it. If it’s a project with a fat or relaxed deadline there is wiggle room to go back and give it a tune-up in the various stages of development. I suppose that could fall under evolution as well. Often in this situation I’m learning patience with the growth in this process, things like music videos, music packages, books, etc. Still, the majority of work I just crank out and move on. I typically have a minute to eat 400 saltine crackers. It has all lead to how I’m figuring things out right now. I do have worry jeans to wear, but the best is for me not to worry while at the work table and just keep on being the horse and the plow, only backtracking when looking at the timeline to see how it has stacked up or when answering questions like this one. ​0​3) What inspires your design lately? Life’s layers and languages, seen/unseen. The constant cacophony. Joys and sorrows. The seasons. Looking up/looking down. Taking pictures physically/mentally at the compositions in every turn. Finding value in most anything. Jotting and writing. Food. Movies, music and books are always on the menu. Taking time out. Watching squirrels. My cats and their constant curiosity and lack of boredom. Plucking the weird tree bark hairs on my face. Intuition. Realizing limitations and faulty wiring in some areas can lead to strengths in other places. Being open and accepting to happy accidents. Thinking about life and beyond. Not thinking can help too. Stretching my body’s shadow into traffic and realizing that I am still alive and loved. Everything from the flattened rat on the curb to the clouds and beyond. I feed off a buffet of life’s little things. The advances of Twitter has helped me to share all the little things that keep me in constant motion. I enjoy sharing the things that make me tick and in hopes they don’t tick others off! Ha!: http://twitter.com/#!/djgkcmousa I don’t keep up a whole lot on the happenings of art and design, but I guess I do follow it some. I also don’t really feel like a spokesperson for it. At times, I find I’m a bit of an outsider or that I missed several steps in the art/design play book. But, it’s me and there is a small number of people around the world who have become interested in what I do and that is really fascinating to me. I enjoy sharing and I like what I feel and do whatever I feel like. I’m in a unique position where I can pretty much work without boundaries. Many times I’ll just get it in me and follow where it wants to go. It’s not a big deal/ordeal. It only gets to be and gets to me when I can’t properly pull my weight in the resource department or do enough of it. I need more time, I guess. But, then again, if I had all the time it wouldn’t be enough as there are many things I’d love to accomplish and work on, artistically and personally. Life is so short. But, I shouldn’t be so selfish. ​0​4) How do you feel when you see a body of your work on display at The Brick? 01. There is an instant relief to get it up on the wall after 5pm and not get in the way of people eating or bringing in music equipment. I like to get in and get out. I’m nervous putting up art. I’m nervous not putting up art. 02. I think about the many nail holes I’ve put in the wall over the years and chunks of brick debris I’ve helped knock off the wall. It’s a brick timeline! Hanging a show on a brick wall is a tough go. You just sorta put a nail in where it can go in and start hanging based on that first piece. 03. I get a little down as I am the parent of the art. Perhaps it’s a form of postpartum? Or plain exhaustion? Taking it out of the context of my little part of the basement and inner world is such a weird thing as well. Even though I love sharing the art, I still end up with mixed reviews on a personal level. It’s hard to explain. I think today’s iPromote thing can be overwhelming and soul sucking. It’s best not to think about it. 04. I hang about 35-40 pieces of art selected from the previous 12 months and I feel it isn’t that much to show for a year’s passing. I shouldn’t feel weird about that, but I do. I just don’t feel like I’m doing enough. I’m just very thirsty, I guess? A year’s worth of work isn’t a body of work to me, more like a limb. Once I’m done with all this, then all those limbs can be put together. I’m not sure what you’ll get. 05. I’m worn out but I need to start making stuff for next year. 06. Insert misc. feeling here. 07. I’m hungry. 08. Only eight people showed up. Ah well. ​0​5) Best reaction to your work from an observer at The Brick over the years? Random Dude to Me: “Har. Har. That looks like something I made in Kindergarten. That ain’t art! Who is the artist!?” Me:  ”I agree. I don’t know who that guy is. I just know I’m not a fan.” Also, for the first few years at The Brick I hung up comment canvases with markers taped to them. I got a lot of fun and weird stuff in return. I should scan them in and share them someday soon. The comment canvases became a living piece of art experiment. I’m actually incorporating this idea into a piece I’ll have up this year. It’s called “Gum Mug No. 1″ ​0​6) Are the pieces for sale? Nothing on The Brick wall will be for sale. They are my originals and I rarely sell my kids. I’ve only really sold original art via special charity auctions. I’ve given a few away too. However, on opening night of Saturday, December 4, 2010, I’ll have some various cheap prints for sale and maybe some original little somethings I’m putting together. So, I guess I do sell originals, just not the stuff on the wall. Thank you for the time and support. -djg