#abstract animation can be really satisfying to work on

[toastedseavegetable]

Organic Logos

[skyscrapergods]

i'm working on my own concept for my own mlp fanlore/au and i've been inspired by your take on alicorns to make my own more unique as well. my idea is centric around the concept that alicorns are ponies who acended into what's basically pony elves that get worshiped because of the mysterious way they ascended, but idk how to really make a religion set up that works cohesively with it. i am wondering if you possibly might have some tips and tricks for how to go about my alicorn religions.

The most important thing about religion is that it's made up. If it is based in observable fact, then it's not religion; it's just culture.

Paying taxes and bowing to the king is based on observable orders. Believing that the king has a divine right to be king, or that he has powers/blessings granted to him by birth/status is religion.

In skyscraper gods, things are different because believing something about a god actually has the power to make it true, or at least influence the god's form/powers in an abstract way. My gods are influenced/given power by belief and worship.

In the human world, you can believe whatever you want about any person or god, and that doesn't make it real. If there are gods about, they are unlikely to be controlled by human religion, and definitely aren't spawned by such (or we would have a lot more gods than we do)

In a normal world, religion is not based on observable fact, and it is designed and maintained by the people themselves.

So from my limited understanding of world religions, there are four "needs" that religion is designed to fill: Community, Ritual, Meaning, and Ethics.

I went off the deep end and wrote an essay about my philosophy. Whoops, hope you enjoy:

Community

Humans need community, and many religions involve gathering and doing activities together. This makes religion incredibly important to human social health, as we often fail to fill our need for community because we don't immediately die without it. Under capitalism especially, we are incentivized to ignore as many human needs as possible in order to be productive/survive. Religion makes itself more important than simple survival, and ensures we fill certain needs by promising metaphysical rewards.

Ritual

Ritual is also incredibly important to human health. We thrive when we have a consistent schedule to the day, month, season, and year. It helps us save our brain bandwidth if we already know what basic tasks will happen today. Instead of doing math to figure out optimum times to do so, we socialize, come of age, physically touch, meditate, sing, mourn, plant crops, travel, cook, keep records, hunt, celebrate, and more according to a calendar maintained by religion. These are all important aspects of life that we need to remember to fill, either by logic, community, or religion. Science even backs up the need for ritual, with brain pathways growing best in response to consistent habit-keeping. But brains aren't observable for most people, so we have culture and religion to keep time instead.

Meaning

Meaning is a tricky one. We ended up with brains big enough to wonder why we exist; a burden few animals share. Scientifically, we thrive in environments/jobs/roles where we feel that what we are doing has value. I look at every part of my life and see the value of being a person, observing and changing my environment. Many people on earth aren't sure that's enough, so they invent an unobservable force that assigns value to their lives and actions. Meaning is easiest to keep track of and believe if others share your definition. Culturally, you have a lot in common with your neighbors, you both probably work toward similar goals (housing, stability, connection with others, secular holidays) and are satisfied when those goals are met. Religiously, you have a lot in common with others in your religion (charity, proselytizing, meditation, celebration) and are satisfied when those goals are met. Religion also provides goals for your entire life and community which are helpfully defined for you, whereas you have to come up with that on your own outside of religion. Doing so can be frightening, frustrating, and difficult, so religion is very rewarding and calming.

Ethics

Lastly, there's Ethics. Not all religion deals with ethics, but many major earth faiths do. Humans desperately need to have a code of ethics to be healthy, and society works best when we all agree on some basics. That way when someone violates a law, you don't have to convince everyone around you that what they did was wrong; there's already a standing defined agreement. Ethics is about rewards as well as punishment. For example if you're the first one to read this whole thing I'll draw a pony for you just dm me. Community ethics are decided by those in power, and "those in power" can be: the people themselves via majority rule, chosen representatives, rich aristocracy, respected philosophers, religious appointees, kings and conquerors, holy mystics, sacred texts, etc etc.

Religion comes in with a code of ethics (written by the religiously powerful) and imposes it on its followers. This is useful and generally brings community harmony when they all agree on something. Religions based on ancient texts are tricky, because old, outdated ethics have to be reinterpreted to fit modern landscape. These interpretations split churches and create sub-religions, which mutate into cults, peter off into nothing, or go to war with each other. It's great fun. At the end of the day, having a group of people who agree on right and wrong within their community is the goal. We just got lost on the part that said everyone else in the world has to obey our ethics or else we're blowing up the planet.

...

Aaaanyway, this was about.... my little pony?

Does Religion Affect Gods?

The first thing you must choose is how much the religion is based on fact, and how much is made up. In my world, there's a lot of things that are made up by ponies, that either become true or influence the god's form/powers in some way. Luna used to be silver, but now she is dark blue.

You can do that, or you can be normal about things. Typically, religion does not actually do anything. Gods are gods whether or not they have worshipers. People believe things that gods tell them, and they make up their own lore as well.

What about People? What about this and that and everything?

You need to decide if your alicorns are participants in the religion about them, or just subjects. Do all/some/any of them take their place as religious figures and command the masses? Do they speak ethics? Do they inform ponies of the powers they have? Do ponies make up abilities they think alicorns have? Do they like being worshiped, or is it more like stalking?

Some alicorns may embrace godhood, while others flee from it. The ones that get the most involved will have influence over how the other alicorns are treated.

Is there a standard to which alicorns must live, failing which they can't be "real" alicorns in society's eyes and are thus shunned/killed? Do the alicorns ever give an opinion that is taken way out of proportion and suddenly became a major religious movement? Are marshmallows illegal because one alicorn doesn't like them? Do ponies get prosecuted for stepping on "sacred" flowers which are just regular lilies? Is there taxes/tithing to alicorns? Are alicorns promoted to political office for nothing except their nature?

How do ponies construct their sermons/temples/practices to fulfill the four tenants of religion? Does alicorn worship provide them with Community, Meaning, Ritual, and Ethics?

Do alicorns actually earn any of this? Are they regular guys that just look special? Can they abuse their powers? Can ponies abuse others in their name? Do the alicorns speak to the masses or to religious leaders? Do they have any control over their legacy or is it out of their hooves? Are they in danger of their worshipers deciding they need to be freed from their mortal bodies? Do religious leaders go power crazy and use alicorns to further their agenda? Are their schisms and wars over beliefs? do the alicorns command their followers to fight each other? Do they fight with each other? Does each alicorn have a different following or are they all part of a shared pantheon? Do they respect each others' role within that or struggle for change?

And remember, what is true for one alicorn/church/sect/country may not be true for another. Variety is the key.

It's all About the Questions

The trick to worldbuilding is to ask a lot of questions. You can answer them as you go, having the answers lead to more questions, or you can ask a bunch at once and answer them all later.

Every decision you make has consequences. Big social movements affect the environment, the environment affects food supply, food supply affects social movements. Everything is connected, and religion makes those connections more magical, for better or for worse.

[canmom]

How do you live?

I (finally!) saw Miyazaki's new film 君たちはどう生きるか (How Do You Live?/The Boy and the Heron)! It's been out in the States for a while, and in Japan considerably longer, but it took a while to make its way over here.

I remember at the time it came out, people were having fun riffing on the incredibly cryptic marketing campaign, which consisted only of this rather abstract poster...

In the spirit of this, I resolutely avoided watching any trailers or knowing anything at all about the plot of the film. I picked up a thing or two here and there - I knew to expect some amazing Shinya Ohira animation for example, and you couldn't really avoid seeing the bird with teeth! - but overall, I had no idea.

There's plenty of great writing about this film in English already, such as kvin's fantastic sakugablog piece which discusses the physicality of Ghibli's animation, its weight and springiness, as a throughline. The stuff that kvin talks about really stood out to me as I watched this film. You can likewise read detailed interviews with Toshiyuki Inoue (fantastic interview for sakubutas) and Akihiko Yamashita on fufuro.

First up, the credits of this film are pretty much a who's who of the greatest jp animators of the last 30 years, and they've had some 7 years to cook it, so naturally this film looks fucking amazing. This is absolutely the kind of film that only Miyazaki could direct - its design language feels so familiar and yet it's iterating in all kinds of visually imaginative directions that show that yeah, the old bastard's still got it.

And like, god, man. This film's animation is really something special. Its real-world scenes in particular are full of shots that require an unbelievably strong sense of space, of both subtle and broad acting, the classic Ghibli attention to detail on mechanical objects and everyday tasks. It's full of bouncing and squishing and squeezing and oozing things. It loves to draw crowds and swarms of people and animals. It's the kind of film where any given shot would be the absolute star-of-the-show sakuga moment in just about any other anime film. If you wanted a complete statement of the Ghibli school of animation, it would be hard to do better.

And yet, for all that Miyazaki's known for his tight control over animation and heavy corrections to animators, in this film he had to step back from that kind of role and hand over the sousakkan reins to Takeshi Honda, who steps up admirably - as kvin writes above, bringing in more realist elements to the bouncy Miyazaki style to create a really effective unity that grounds all the big fantastical elements of the film and fills the first act with tension.

Alongside all that excellent key animation, the film's colour and photography departments evidently understand that well-chosen colours and good highlight shapes beat all the digital gradients and overlays you can imagine - the drawings get plenty of form from the strength of the animation, and the flat shading really pops. The backgrounds are as delicious as ever, skyscapes and vegetation and opulent interiors with the just-slightly desaturated and harmonious colours that just kind of remind you that oh yeah, it is still possible to do it this way.

Basically it's a Ghibli film lol. You know how it is.

But what of the story...? What's all this technical magic in service of?

The film's story has something of the feel of a serial story, perhaps reflecting Miyazaki's (in)famous process of working out the film gradually as he draws the storyboards. Certain ideas, like the parakeet empire, arrive in the film rather suddenly and then become fairly central to the plot. There's a clear emotional throughline, but this is not a film that is in a hurry to explain itself more than it absolutely has to. It wants to keep its magical elements numinous and mysterious. I would say, though, it's generally more satisfying in this approach than some of Miyazaki's other later films like Howl's Moving Castle, and resolves a lot more clearly.

So what is it like, About? Well, Miyazaki has been pretty open about channeling a lot of his personal relationships into the film, and a lot of it seems to reflect more or less obliquely on him. It's what they call a 'personal film'. The protagonist's position as the son of an aeroplane factory owner during WWII is straight-up from life. What about the old sorcerer, haphazardly stacking blocks to keep a world alive, and looking for someone to succeed him? The reading's kinda obvious, even if Miya himself says this guy is based on his memory of Takahata. Well, he can be both...

To say more I'm gonna have to delve into the spoiler zone. See you below the cut.

OK so! Let's try and get some thoughts in order.

first, a plot summary type of thing

Our first act introduces us to Mahito at roughly the moment his mother Hisako dies in a hospital fire. This is midway through the war, which is present mostly in the background - now and then we see soldiers marching around, and of course Mahito's dad runs a factory producing warplane parts, not entirely unlike Miyazaki's own father although seemingly a bit higher up the ladder.

We jump forward a little and Mahito's father remarries - to his deceased wife's sister, no less, and she's already pregnant. This is Natsuko, who does her best to play the role of mother, but Mahito still has big traumas and he is understandably not entirely on board with the idea of welcoming a mum 2 who looks almost exactly like mum 1. He moves with Natsuko into a huge old house complex, a mix of older Japanese architecture with a more recent Western wing where the family currently sleeps - and staffed by a small army of colourful old ladies who are eager for any canned meat or cigarettes they can get their hands on.

Also there's this freaky heron that keeps bothering Mahito. It seems to have something to do with a mysterious tower which turns out to have been built by his great-uncle. Mahito visits the tower, but can't make his way inside. Natsuko tells him not to go into the tower.

Mahito goes to school, but naturally they don't much take to the new rich kid on the block, and so after being attacked by his classmates on his way home he injures himself with a rock. (His dumbass dad is like, who did this to you son, I'll fuck 'em up.) For the rest of the movie, he has half his head shaved to accomodate a bandage, which is the sort of attention to detail this movie loves.

The heron has started growing teeth and talking to Mahito, telling him to come to the tower. Mahito is convinced it's a trap, and after a maybe-dream sequence in which Natsuko shoots an arrow to drive off the heron, he steals cigarettes from Natsuko in order to get one of the servants to sharpen his knife, and then constructs a bow and arrow out of bamboo - using a couple of the heron's feathers. Constructing the bow and arrow is shown in immense, loving detail.

In the process, he witnesses Natsuko walk into the forest, and also stumbles on a book: How Do You Live? by Genzaburō Yoshino, which contains a handwritten message from his mother. He looks at this book briefly... and this is about the extent of the connection of the film to the book, beyond thematic parallels.

The maids notice that Natsuko is missing. Mahito tells one of the maids, Kiriko, that he saw her go into the forest, and they follow, finding an old road that gives another approach to the tower. They're greated by the heron man, who is increasingly emerging from the heron's beak to reveal a big warty nose. He's some kind of like... heron selkie or something, a gnome in a heron skin. There's some wonderfully grotesque animation around this guy.

Heron dude taunts Mahito with an illusion of his mother Hisako. Mahito threatens him with the bow - the heron guy is like, do your worst, not realising it's a maaagic arrow. The arrow chases him around the room and pierces his beak, fucking up his magic. At this point, the tower master shows up and orders the heron to guide Mahito. Heron guy sends everyone through the floor into a fantastical world...

Mahito arrives in front of a huge, sinister tomb. He approaches the gate, and a swarm of pelicans walk up behind, crawling all over him and pressing him through the gate. This causes a storm to start brewing, since opening the gate seems to piss off the stones or something...

A fisher woman resembling a much younger Kiriko runs up and chases the pelicans away. She takes Mahito under her wing, explaining that this world is inhabited mostly by dead people, but there are also these little round guys called the wareware, who gain the ability to fly when they eat a fish's guts.

Kiriko, uniquely in this world, has the ability to kill, so she catches fish to sell to the other inhabitants and feed to the wareware; she and Mahito butcher a huge fish. Mahito fairly quickly figures out that she is somehow the same Kiriko that entered with him. She has tiny charms representing the other maids, which serve an apotropaic function.

That night, staying on Kiriko's huge derelict ship of a home, they watch the wareware rise into the sky to be born as humans in Mahito's world. They're attacked by the pelicans, but a fire-wielding magic user called Hisa (hmmmmmmmmmm) drives the pelicans away. Mahito shouts at her not to harm the wareware, but Kiriko assures him that more of the wareware will survive thanks to Hisa's intervention.

Later, a singed and dying pelican explains the pelicans' predicament to Mahito in a scene that calls to mind the animals in Mononoke-hime. The pelicans are foreigners in this world, they don't have anything to eat, so they take it as their role to eat the wareware. The heron man arrives on the scene too, offering to help Mahito find Natsuko as Mahito - coming in to his own as a protagonist more - buries the pelican. Mahito distrusts him but eventually Kiriko persuades them to give working together a try.

Mahito and the heron set out. As they pass through a forest, the heron reveals that thanks to Mahito's arrow, he can't fly and do heron shit anymore - and by magic law, only Mahito can fix the hole. Mahito applies his new woodworking skills to fashion a bung for the hole. The heron tries to stage a top 10 anime betrayal, but then the bung needs more work, so Mahito fixes it, and from that point on, the heron joins the party and he and Mahito are fast friends.

(You might wonder why I just call him 'the heron' and not by a name. He never gets named! He's just the heron man.)

Mahito and the heron arrive at the house of a blacksmith who's supposed to help them find Natsuko, only to find it guarded by big buff parakeet men. The parakeets are splendidly goofy round guys - they remind me of the heedra in Nausicaa. The heron draws the parakeets away, and Mahito enters the house, only to find, uh oh! More parakeets. The parakeets prepare to eat Mahito, who is not carrying a child and therefore fair game unlike Natsuko, but Hisa shows up and burns them with fire magic. She looks just like a young version of Mahito's mum! Funny that. Hisa helps Mahito escape into her house through the fire, and then takes him to infiltrate the parakeets' empire.

In the human world, the maids explain the backstory of the tower to Mahito's dad. It's a weird meteorite that came from space, it turns out, and Mahito's great-uncle built the tower on top of it before eventually disappearing inside. Mahito's dad overprepares in an elaborate getup complete with katana, and goes to try to rescue everyone.

Hisa leads Mahito to a corridor full of doors which open into all the different worlds, including his own world. Mahito briefly glimpses his dad coming to try and rescue him - the two see each other briefly, but the parakeets catch wind of the whole thing and attack, and so Mahito and Hisa have to flee back into the magical world. We see that the parakeet guys turn into regular parakeets when they come into the human world. Mahito's dad becomes convinced he turned into a parakeet.

Mahito and Hisa make their way to the delivery room where Natsuko is resting, waiting to give birth. On their way, lightning starts emerging from the stone - Hisa explains that the stone is sentient and pissed with them. Mahito insists on approaching Natsuko despite this being a huge taboo. They have a heart to heart - Natsuko's mask breaks and she tells Mahito she hates him, while he finally starts calling her mother, as he's assaulted by paper charms that tear at him violently. They part, with Hisa burning the charms to free Mahito, but it's too much and they both pass out.

Mahito dreams of meeting the sorcerer, who stacks irregularly shaped wooden blocks, and explains that stacking the blocks is necessary to maintain the world, buying a few days at a time. The sorcerer reveals the huge flying rock that is the source of his power; he also shows Mahito some blocks, but Mahito somehow divines that these blocks are 'stone for building tombs' and stained with malice. The sorcerer approvingly says this is a good sign for Mahito's ability to succeed him.

While they were asleep, the parakeets have captured Hisa and Mahito. One of them is preparing to eat Mahito, but the heron arrives just in time to save him. They Metal Gear Solid their way through the kingdom while the Parakeet King - a big swaggering guy very like the colonel in Castle in the Sky - goes to press a claim on the wizard, using Hisa and Mahitos' taboo act of entering the delivery room as a bargaining chip. There's some very funny scenes where the parakeets cheer for their king.

Mahito pursues the parakeet king, but the king destroys the staircase behind him, and talks to the sorcerer. The sorcerer is inclined to wave away the transgression, because he wants to let Mahito succeed him, but the parakeet king seems to be bringing him around. I kind of forget how this part went, but the parakeet king goes away from the sorcerer for a bit while Hisa is freed from her prison thing.

Mahito climbs back up with the heron man's help, arriving in the sorcerer's little subplane. The parakeet king quietly follows him, after telling his aides to inform his subjects he was a good king. Mahito approaches the sorcerer, who reveals he has found a new set of blocks, unstained by malice, and again invites Mahito to succeed him. Mahito says that his self-injury is proof of his malice, making him unfit for the job.

At this point, the parakeet king intervenes. Angry at all this sorcerous malarky, he desperately attempts to stack the stones himself, but when they don't stack, he flies into a rage and slices them with his sword. This naturally causes the world to start collapsing, and everyone runs to the doors to escape into the human world.

Mahito has by this point figured out that Hisa is his mum, and he asks if she really wants to go back to their world, knowing that she will very definitely die in a fire not much later. But she is naturally on board with this. Young!Kiriko goes with her, suggesting that she and Hisako entered the magical world at the same time. Meanwhile, Mahito returns to his own time, with Natsuko and the heron. All the various parakeets and pelicans come out through this door too. Old!Kiriko is restored from her apatropaic charm.

As everyone celebrates their safe return (and the appearance of a fuckton of birds), the heron tells Mahito that he ought to forget what happened in the magic world. We skip forward again, with Mahito - now with a baby sibling - setting off to Tokyo. Roll credits!

now let's comment on it

This is not a film that necessarily prioritises an internal logic playing out - new elements enter unexpectedly even quite late in the film. The sorcerer's motivation is murky until late on; the parakeets become major antagonists despite entering only halfway through the film.

There is a certain temptation, knowing how autobiographical this film is, to take it is a roman à clef. Mahito is of course a young Miyazaki; the old sorcerer's concern about finding a successor might be about Miyazaki wondering who should take over Ghibli or if it should just be allowed to die. Under this schema, the parakeets might be Ghibli's legion of fans, or the merchandising empire that prints their designs on every possible product. kvin's article develops this kind of reading, finding some angles I wouldn't have even considered, such as how the idea of weight communicated by the animation factors in to such an allegaroy. It's also something suggested in Miyazaki's own comments about the film, where the sorcerer is Takahata, the heron man is producer Toshio Suzuki...

It definitely helps to know a bit about Miyazaki's background when approaching this film. However, I think it would be reductive to go too far with this kind of reading, and take everything as an allegory for something in Miyazaki's life. The film still has to stand on its own feet!

'Coming of age' is the spin put on it by some outlets, like the BBC. And this is accurate to an extent. The arc of this film is similar to Spirited Away: Mahito starts out sullen and traumatised, but like Chihiro he transitions over the course of his journey in the magical world into the kind of determined Miyazaki protagonist we're used to. On this coming of age angle... well, also like with Chihiro, I don't find the Mahito of the first part of the film especially unsympathetic, his alienation is extremely natural given his situation. Mahito's dad kinda sucks! Living in wartime Japan also really kinda sucks, even if you're the son of a rich dude. But definitely over the course of the film Mahito has a change of heart towards Natsuko, and forms friendships that motivate him to try to protect them. His character arc definitely sees him become 'more prosocial'.

However, there's another angle that's pretty important - the idea of the weight of 'malice', the cursed existences of the pelicans and the like, and the fantasy of building a utopian world that is free of these things. This returns to a theme of Nausicaa, the manga in particular, where Nausicaa discovers that the world she knows - the toxic forest in particular - is actually an elaborate artificial system for cleansing the world of pollutants, that the clean world on the other side will be uninhabitable to her and her people, and that the architects of this system wait in stasis to replace them in this utopian future world. Nausicaa destroys them, commiting instead to an uncertain future.

In Mononoke-hime likewise, we encounter the lepers and former sex workers of Irontown clinging on to the 'cursed' world. Their extractivist project proves incredibly destructive, but the film still regards them sympathetically, and the resolution sees them perhaps finding a new way to live - and San, the feral girl, reconciling herself to the idea of humans.

Here, although the parakeet king forces the decision, Mahito has already declared that he doesn't believe he's fit to oversee a utopia, but instead that his place is in the awful, violent human world.

The film, and the book it's vaguely based on, are titled How do you live? In Japanese, that's a plural 'you' (君たち). There's a lot of ways you could read it, depending on who you take as 'you' - a child asking an adult how to live, or equally a future question of how will you live. This is a lot more explicit in the novel - which I have not read, but here is a summary courtesy of wiki:

Junichi Honda is a fifteen-year-old junior high school student, known by his nickname Koperu, after the astronomer Nicholas Copernicus. He is athletic and academically gifted, and popular at school. Koperu's father, a bank executive, passed away when he was young and he lives with his mother. His uncle (on his mother's side) lives nearby and visits frequently. Koperu and his uncle are very close. Koperu shares about his life and his uncle gives him support and advice. His uncle also documents and comments on these interactions in a diary, with the intent to eventually give the diary to Koperu. The diary writing, which is interspersed with the narrative, provides insight into the ethical and emotional trials that Koperu shared with his uncle. The diary entries, which cover themes such as "view of things", "structure of society", "relation", etc. are in the style of a note written to Koperu.[8]

Thinking like Copernicus that our Earth is a celestial body moving within the vastness of space, or thinking that our Earth is fixed at the center of the universe, are two ways of thinking that, in reality, are not only related to astronomy. Even when we think about things like the world around us or our own lives, the truth is that we are still revolving around them after all.

In the end, Koperu writes a decision on his future way of living as a reply to his uncle, and the novel ends with the narrator asking the question "how do you live?" to the reader.

The author of the novel was a socialist, who had been imprisoned by the nationalist government, and wrote the book intending to impart lessons on ethics. The version of his book published after the war was heavily edited to strip the book of political content. But it's also, perhaps paradoxically, a book that centres on very wealthy characters, aimed narrowly at educated boys, though it became a widely read classic.

Studio Ghibli's films, from both Miyazaki and Takahata, have a habit of being framed as imparting something to the younger generation - something the pair seem to have seen as a mission all the way back in the days of Panda Kopanda. For example, while Grave of the Fireflies is seen as the classic tragic war movie, for Takahata it was also aimed at criticising what he saw as the careless, consumerist generation of the 80s; the stubborn arrogance of the protagonist supposed to reflect on this. It's an attitude that also emerges in their comments about Chihiro. And, indeed, one of the first things we heard about How Do You Live? was that it was aimed towards Miyazaki's grandson - and more broadly towards that generation.

So what does this film have to say to the younger generations? Let's have a look at it from Mahito's POV.

For Mahito, the adults in his life are all pretty complicated. His father is enthusiastic and well-meaning but incredibly oblivious to what his son is going through (we might recall some of what Miyazaki wrote about his father in Starting Point, describing him as basically a grifter). Natsuko is masking pretty hard, trying to play the role of Good New Mum and connect to her newly acquired son, but there's an intrinsic distance. It is understandable that Mahito would want to reject them.

Mahito is... not entirely a passive character, he goes to some efforts to for example fashion the bow and arrow and repair the heron man's beak, but mostly he is pulled around by the plot into a strange world he doesn't understand. At first, his instinct is to retreat, even to the point of self-injury. Once he arrives in the magical world, he has acquired something of a purpose (finding Natsuko), but he gets pushed into near-disaster situations (the pelicans piling up to push him through the gate at the tomb) or stumbles into circumstances where something is expected of him (hey kid, gut this fish!). Gradually though his exposure to this world pulls him out of his shell. He runs into conflicts and injustices that seem intractable - the wareware and the pelicans - and has little power to intervene except to bury the bodies.

Eventually, he gets to carry out his main objective - finding Natsuko - but despite finally deciding to accept Natsuko as his new mother, he finds himself rejected, not just by her but also by the earth. Perhaps feeling responsible for getting her into trouble, his new objective becomes rescuing freshly-damsel'd Hisa. But now new adults want things of him - his great-uncle has decided he'd make a fine successor. Mahito has to make a decision here about what relationships he wants to commit to, what sort of life he wants to build - and he chooses the world he found so alienating at the outset of the film, the one which hurt him by taking his mother, not to the secondary-world fantasy.

It could be a 'this world is all we have' sort of statement, perhaps. But also the last act of the film feels like it gets a bit caught up in Castle in the Sky-style adventure-story beats.

I do feel like some aspects of the film ended up a little underbaked - which is an odd thing to say because it's not a short film and there is so much in it already. But Hisa for example - she's got badass powers and all, but I feel we barely get a chance to get a sense of what motivates her. Why did she enter the fantasy world? She acts at first like she doesn't know Mahito is her future son, but rapidly becomes incredibly devoted to him (in a way that reads a little romancey lmao). So much of her screen time is dedicated to having her convey the secrets of the world that it's hard to get a bead on her as a person.

Likewise, Natsuko - why did she enter this world to have her baby in this special ritual delivery chamber? She clearly knows more than most of the characters, but she gets kind of sidelined after Mahito confronts her, with wizard shit becoming more central. The animation does such a fantastic job of selling her feelings in the first part of the film that it feels like a shame that she drifts away at the end.

The progression of the film feels rather like a dream, where everything is arranged by symbolic significance to Mahito. It makes sense... on a magical level, where the secondary world is shaped primarily by parallels in the real one. So the tiny apatropaic statues of the old ladies protect him because they represent the role the real old ladies have in his life. Hisa has fire magic because Hisako died in a fire. Once Mahito has come to his personal resolutions about returning to the world, the magical one is no longer needed, and it collapses.

This is not such an uncommon role for magic in a story. In Miyazaki's own works, we have Totoro and Spirited Away, where a magical world provides direction or relief to a child's real struggles. Or take for example Okiura's film A Letter To Momo, in which the three yōkai recognise taking care of the grieving Momo as their explicit purpose as spirits. This magical world comes to Mahito to help him come to terms with losing his mother, and reorient himself towards living in a painful world.

Meanwhile, the sorcerer, whether he be Miyazaki or Takahata, is quite a distant figure. He may maintain the magical world by stacking his blocks, may be the authority which factions within it must plead to, but he also rules from afar in a vast empty palace full of long halls and open air spaces. His main company seems to be a big fucking rock, with which he made a 'contract'. He's generally handling it a bit better than, say, Ushiromiya Kinzo - he receives the parakeet king with good humour - but he's a pretty flawed god of his little world. So much of this world seems to pre-exist him, it's not something he constructed. Still, when he shows up, you pretty much have to do what he says.

If this is about Miyazaki's relation to Takahata, it seems like quite a sad portrayal. But 'unapproachable patriarch' does sorta describe their role in the studio from what I understand (c.f. Oshii's infamous article comparing them to the Kremlin).

When it comes to the question of who should succeed Miyazaki, we should probably consider the matter of Yoshifumi Kondō, who was being set up as the next big Ghibli director until his untimely death - which allegedly Takahata was willing to accept the blame for. The mythology built up around Miyazaki and Takahata is double-edged.

Here are some rather startling comments from Toshiyuki Inoue's interview. Inoue is one of the most impressive animators who ever lived in my book, the other star of the realist line besides Okiura. Just have a look at his booru page: iconic scenes from GitS, Akira, Millenium Actress; even in more recent films, he pretty much carried Maquia, and steals the show with his scenes in Miss Hokusai.

And yet even he was intimidated to be working alongside Miyazaki when he first came on board for Kiki's Delivery Service, fresh off Akira:

I believe you’ve always been a fan of Miyazaki’s, why were you scared to work with him? Toshiyuki Inoue: I had heard quite a few scary stories. A lot of acquaintances had worked on Nausicaä, Laputa and Totoro before that, so I knew how scary he could be when he got angry – I had heard stories of people being fired mid-production, things like that. How was it actually? Toshiyuki Inoue: Not as scary as I had imagined. He’d only rarely scream in the studio. But he did get angry. I’d sometimes be called to some separate room and lectured alongside Kōji Morimoto and Masaaki Endō. It felt like being in school all over again.

'Only rarely'. Honestly. Inoue describes how difficult it was for him to adapt his logical, analytical style to Ghibli's stretchy, bouncy characters - and how Miyazaki would disparage him if he, for example, drew a ship inaccurately.

For Inoue, coming back to How Do You Live was something like a 'return match'. He talks about how an older Miyazaki was no longer able to strictly correct the animation, and in general age was limiting him, but he still feels that Miyazaki is fundamentally superior:

Toshiyuki Inoue: I’ve always wished for a return match or a way to redeem myself. But even if I say that, I know I can’t even pretend to rival Miyazaki. I just can’t win. He’s extremely smart and learned, and on top of that, as an animator he always transcends common sense: he’s so talented that I know very well there’s nothing I can do against it. The more I learn about him, the more I realize I’ll never be on that level.

Miyazaki's genius is undeniable, but man... it's not a good mindset to cultivate if you want to find a successor lmao. If even Inoue doesn't feel he can measure up, who the hell could?

Mind you, it does rather seem that Miyazaki had mellowed out by the point of How Do You Live?. Here's Yamashita:

Akihiko Yamashita: As I said, the core of an animator’s job is to follow what the director asks, so whenever I had trouble with that, I’d go see Miyazaki to show him my roughs. He’d advise me on the things that were missing and reassure me about those that were good. He really helped me to gain more confidence in myself.

Reading these interviews underlines pretty hard that we shouldn't get too caught up in the mythology of Miyazaki the mighty auteur. While the story may be all on Miyazaki, and most of the character designs (with the notable exception of Natsuko)... so much of the details of the animation, the stuff that really makes this film land, is primarily shaped by everyone else - Honda in particular, but also the individual key animators who interpreted his scenes. I really need to get my hands on a copy of that Industrial History of Studio Ghibli book to get a less Miyazaki-centric perspective on the studio's history.

I do not feel, having come out of this film, any closer to knowing the answer to that eternally pressing question of how do you live - I guess I'm still working out my answer to that one, and I will be until I die. And maybe that's rather the point. I think this film still carries some of the flaws of Miyazaki's later films - despite having so many iconic scenes, it doesn't quite seem to know where it's going. But I am so glad to have seen this in the theatre (I saw it at the Prince Charles theatre in Soho with friends, the theatre was completely packed!), and glad Miyazaki managed to get this one out before he goes. Whatever happens to Ghibli without its sorcerer, it's been a hell of a thing to witness.

[cherrygirlystuff]

Welcome to Neon Nostalgia – Your New Obsession with the Grungy, Lo-Fi Sounds of the 2000s Indie Scene!

Hey, babe! 🌸 If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a soft spot for the gritty, raw vibes of the 2000s indie music scene. You know the one – where every mixtape felt like a secret message, vinyl was more than just a collector’s item, and band posters were basically sacred art. Whether you were the queen of the local indie shows or just loved getting lost in the lo-fi sounds, I’ve got the perfect blog for you: Neon Nostalgia. Get ready to dive into a world dedicated to everything we adore about the 2000s indie scene – from mixtapes to vinyl art, and those iconic band posters that still make our hearts skip a beat. 🎧✨

Why Neon Nostalgia? 🌟

First things first, let’s talk about why Neon Nostalgia is about to become your new fave hangout spot on the internet. This blog isn’t just about looking back – it’s about celebrating everything that made the 2000s indie scene so unforgettable. It’s a space where you can relive the magic, discover hidden gems, and connect with other music lovers who feel the same way. Whether you’re here for the mixtapes, the art, or just the vibes, Neon Nostalgia is all about keeping the spirit of indie alive and thriving.

Mixtapes: The Ultimate Love Letter 🎶

Remember when making a mixtape was basically the highest form of flattery? Those carefully curated playlists were more than just a collection of songs – they were love letters, friendship bracelets, and time capsules all rolled into one. At Neon Nostalgia, we’re all about bringing back that mixtape magic.

1. Curated Mixtapes for Every Mood 💌

Neon Nostalgia features specially curated mixtapes that capture the essence of the 2000s indie scene. Whether you’re in the mood for something moody and introspective or want to dance like nobody’s watching, there’s a mixtape for that. And the best part? Each mixtape comes with a little backstory, so you can really feel the vibes that inspired it.

2. Make Your Own Mixtape Challenge 🎧

Feeling inspired? Why not take on the Neon Nostalgia Mixtape Challenge? It’s all about putting together your own playlist that tells a story – whether it’s about love, heartbreak, or just your favorite summer memories. Share it with the community, and who knows? You might just find your new music soulmate.

Vinyl Art: Where Music Meets Masterpiece 🎨

If you’re a vinyl lover, you know that it’s not just about the sound – it’s about the experience. There’s something so satisfying about holding a record in your hands, admiring the cover art, and letting the needle drop onto the vinyl. Neon Nostalgia takes that experience to the next level with its dedication to vinyl art.

1. Iconic Vinyl Covers of the 2000s 🎵

Neon Nostalgia has a whole section dedicated to the most iconic vinyl covers of the 2000s indie scene. From the minimalist beauty of The Strokes’ Is This It to the dreamy artwork of In Rainbows by Radiohead, these covers weren’t just packaging – they were works of art that perfectly captured the spirit of the music.

2. DIY Vinyl Art Projects 🖌️

Feeling crafty? Neon Nostalgia’s got you covered with DIY vinyl art projects. Whether you want to create your own album cover, repurpose an old record into something new, or just get inspired by the creativity of others, this is the perfect place to unleash your inner artist.

Band Posters: The Art of the Indie Scene 🖼️

Let’s be real – our walls were never the same after we discovered band posters. They were more than just decorations; they were statements, identities, and windows into a world where music was everything. Neon Nostalgia knows the power of a good band poster and celebrates it with style.

1. The Best Band Posters of the 2000s 🎸

Neon Nostalgia features a collection of the best band posters from the 2000s indie scene. Whether it’s the bold, graphic designs of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the dreamy, abstract posters for Animal Collective, or the gritty, DIY aesthetic of Arctic Monkeys, each poster tells its own story.

2. How to Create Your Own Band Poster 🎨

Ever dreamed of making your own band poster? Neon Nostalgia has tips and tricks for creating your own poster, whether you’re a graphic design pro or just starting out. It’s all about capturing the energy and vibe of the music you love in a way that’s totally you.

Final Thoughts, Gorgeous: Let’s Keep the Indie Spirit Alive!

So there you have it, babe – Neon Nostalgia is your new go-to for everything related to the grungy, lo-fi sounds of the 2000s indie scene. Whether you’re here for the mixtapes, the vinyl art, or the band posters, it’s all about celebrating a time when music was raw, real, and totally unforgettable.

And the best part? Neon Nostalgia isn’t just about looking back – it’s about keeping that indie spirit alive. It’s about connecting with other music lovers, discovering new favorites, and maybe even making some art of your own. So whether you’re reminiscing about your first indie show or just discovering the magic of the 2000s for the first time, Neon Nostalgia is here to keep the vibes going strong.

Are you as obsessed with the 2000s indie scene as I am? Let’s chat in the comments about your favorite bands, mixtapes, and everything else that makes Neon Nostalgia so special! 💕

[jariten]

2024 Year roundup! (Part 4)

ヒロイン失格 (No Longer Heroine), Momoko Koda [Trans. Alexandra McCullough-Garcia]

吉祥寺だけが住みたい街ですか？ (Is Kichijoji the Only Place to Live?), Hirochi Maki

ダンス・ダンス・ダンスール (Dance Dance Danseur), George Asakura

ダブル (Double), Ayako Noda [Trans. Massiel Gutierrez]

BABY BLUE HEAVEN, Nao Tsutsumitani

天然コケッコー (Tennen Kokekko), Fusako Kuramochi

Dance Dance Danseur is kinda the japanese manga thats been in my possession the longest without being read. I finally got started about 2 years ago (not knowing the anime started airing at the exact same moment), got overwhelmed with other things, stopped at 5/16 volumes, started again a couple months ago and had to ask myself ??? why did you stop? A lot of what I like about sports manga aside from the exciting matches is the frustrating but rewarding journey of polishing a skill, and series like Blue Period and Akane-banashi like captures that but its not sports so like, craft manga? We are polishing and getting to know a craft with deep history and tradition. The narrative structure of the series is just really engaging to me and the artistic depiction of ballet is so effective. I really need to catch up all the way.

Double is sort of the inverse of Sanmon Shousetsushuu because oooohhh these people need each other they need it each other so bad its left them twisted, I want to read more I need to see where it all ends up.

2024 I finally read a lot of series and check authorships I had been wanting to check for a while, made a lot of progress on my backlog and become more convinced by the virtues of a reread. So my aims for 2025 as most of my "discovery" itches have become satisfied (for now) my goal is to focus less on acquiring things to read be it in the physical sense or the abstract "another one for my list" way, but to go back to works and creators I know I love and find new ways to enjoy their work. But basically, I just want to clear my backlog once and for all so I can go into 2026 with an empty list LOL. Also want to report that the scheduled Tokimeki Tonight reread has begun... and I will have so much to say in the January roundup. Truly a one of a kind series. Here's to another year of new manga and exciting reading experiences!!!

[quarterlifekitty]

hi! i love you! i enjoy all your freaky thoughts >:))) but i also need help! i’m working on a hybrid oc x ghoap type of fic but i just am not sure abt the mechanics of how to write hybrids? maybe that’s so stupid but i love your writing and i trust you’ll give me a lovely answer >:)

Well, it’s hard to give advice on writing hybrids because it’s very much up to you!

Basically, the way I approach it anyways, is that hybrids are somewhere on a sliding scale between people and animal in looks, mannerisms, and physical traits. You get to decide where they are on this scale, if there’s any variety in your world as to where they fall on the scale, and what that means.

Because things are so up in the air in like a political and moral sense (I’ll explain this), people usually write hybrid stuff to be rather short form and light. Cause if you delve too deep then you’re kind of begging the question of why hybrids aren’t just counted as people. It’s like asking if Winston from overwatch should be able to vote. They’re questions that don’t really have satisfying or direct answers, and I’m assuming you want to write porn/romance and not a strange, hamfisted allegory, so I would generally advise avoiding hybrid rights. Not to say that it can’t be done in a way that isn’t distracting, but it’s not the easiest.

In my fics I tend to imagine that hybrids are incapable of long-term thought processes and conceptual/abstract thinking. Like they have no idea how to answer “where will you be in five years” and they can’t learn algebra. While I’ve never found a good time to incorporate this into my writing, I also like to imagine that hybrids have a slightly devolved joint/bone in their thumbs that makes them less than fully opposable. This allows for the existence of “hybrid proof” locks and things.

I’m also kinda on the normie side of it so I imagine that hybrids are on a similar physical scale to humans and are more like anime catgirls than full furries (they have some key features of the animal like ears, tails, or patches of fur but they don’t have like snouts or literal paws).

You also have to decide their relationships to humans. Some people prefer to be treated like literal animals (aka not getting fucked by regular humans) but most people like to imagine that hybrids and humans bone down. Does the hybrid have a say in the matter? You have to decide.

If you want to see a fanfic where more of like the human rights angle is tackled, I would suggest @/boogler’s Lapdog On a Farm. In that one they kinda cover that hybrids don’t have any bodily autonomy and that they have names given to them by their parents, their true names, but also ones given to them by owners.

Hybrid/hybrid stuff is sometimes different. Usually it’s the undersea ones where there are no humans involved whatsoever. In those, hybrids are more like mermaids typically. They’ll have their own kind of culture perhaps, and they’re more just like humans that live underwater. You can also choose to write about everyone being a hybrid. You could write one where hybrids are the superior beings and humans are subservient. The world is your oyster and there’s no wrong way to do it!

[radioimg]

good evening boss i don't know if you're okay with answering these kinds of questions (totally okay if not !!) but could you share how you clipped the floyd card into the gif in koebi's header? thank you so much if you do!❤

good afternoon! wa, sorry this is late you sent this while i was asleep </33 but yes, i love explaining things actually, im always happy to teach. this is pretty easy to do!

first things first, set up your canvas with whatever size youd like, and place the picture you want to "splash" through!

^ im just going to remake my header on koebi lol, so im using floyd!

next, open up the gif you would like to use. the one im using is the very last splash here! the splash needs to be on top of the image you want to show through!

*gifs in photopea come in folders, with each frame present and named '_a_0,50' or '_a_frm0,50' with the 0 being replaced by frame number, and 50 by the time that frame is shown. if they are not labeled like this, they wont animate. gifs work differently in photoshop!

because i wanted the outside to be black, and the splash to be white, i inversed the colors of the gif. to do this, you need to select all of the layers in the gif, it wont work by selecting the folder. you can select them all quickly but clicking on the top frame, holding CTRL, then clicking on the very last frame in the folder, then it should select them all. do CTRL + I or on the top bar, select image -> adjustments -> invert.

now the edges will be black! if you liked them white, skip this step! if youd like to change its color to something not black or white, you can use a gradient map! the left of the gradient map replaces dark colors/black and the right replaces light colors/white

so you can alter your colors to whatever you want! do keep in mind, however, if you make the blacks too light or the whites too dark, the contrast of the gif might not be as good and/or, the blending modes might not apply exactly like you want them to.

if you have an inverted gif, you can change the blending mode to darker color for the white to turn transparent and show your image underneath. the blending modes are the drop down options next to opacity and fill, above the layers panel.

if you want the black to disappear and white to stay, you can use the screen blending mode

then you would end with a gif like this:

if you are trying to overlay a gif with a gradient map coloring, you might need to play around with the blending mode options to find one that fits. a good rule of thumb is that if you want the lighter color to stay, use the lighten modes in blending modes. if you want the darker colors to stay, use the darken modes in blending modes.

^ here's a little chart of the blending modes and their general purposes. taken from this article, which does a decent job at going over them in a brief manner.

once you are satisfied, you can export just like that, or you can drop a psd/coloring of your choice for colors!

AS FOR CLIPPING IN GIFS! its the same way as you would a picture! this time, move your image on top of the gif, and then right click your image then select clipping mask. it should be noted that this only really works if your gif is transparent, like so:

then you would end with a gif like this:

this doesn't necessarily work on gifs that aren't transparent. however, if they are two, different, solid colors, you can use the magic wand tool to get rid of the color you don't want. just be wary that 1. you would have to go through every single frame, one by one, and delete the color in each individual one and also 2. the magic want tool isnt perfect and may leave a rough outline. and if the two colors are too similar or the shape is too abstract, it might not be able to grab very well. you can change the magic wands tolerance to adjust how much of a color it 'grabs'.

i hope all of this helps!! if something didn't make sense at all, let me know, i loove rambling about how to edit lmao.

[khomabrutalist]

Would you answer for Simonetta black-eyed Susan or monkshood from the Language of Flowers asks?

Ooh those are good ones, thank you!

(Original post here!)

Black-eyed Susan: Does Rook believe justice exists? (The act/concept, not the character) Would they ever take justice into their own hands?

She sees it as fully above her pay grade to philosophize about things like "justice" or "morality." Viago took her in as a dirty, scraggly, half-starved urchin and elevated her to what is functionally a position of nobility, and she has been doggedly loyal to the Crows generally and him specifically ever since, and that really informs her view of the world more than anything else.

By which I mean that while she hardly believes in the Antivan Crows as arbiters of truth and justice, she doesn't trust a politician as far as she can throw one, and she'd sooner stab a merchant prince in the heart than listen to his idea of what "just" means. She believes in the ideal of justice, sure! Does she believe it's a thing that any real authority has an interest in facilitating? Not really, no, and again, it's not in the job description to wax philosophical about.

And if she could leave it there and be satisfied with it that would be amazing for her purposes, but alas this is Rook we're talking about, and there has to be a reason Varric saw something in her worth recruiting. Because the fact of the matter is it does boil her blood when she happens upon weaker people being used or exploited, and, well, if she has the skills to do something about it, why wouldn't she take out a couple dozen Antaam to free a bunch of captives? They needed to be taken out anyway, she reasons. Someone was gonna have to do it.

I think she ends up admiring Neve's work with the Shadow Dragons immensely, does what she can to support it, even, but at the end of the day she's not cut out for anything that organized. She'd much rather do things her own, chaotic way.

Monkshood: Does Rook ever think about their own death?

Not actively, I don't think. It exists in the back of her mind as an abstract, something that will come for her eventually but come on she's got shit to do in the meantime. Maybe it's the fact that as a Crow it is kind of her constant companion to the point that it just becomes white noise after a while, but at the same time, she's just self destructive enough that some part of her does seem to have a bit of a fascination with it outside of professional matters. But she's not really the type to self-reflect, so that mostly just lingers below the surface. None of that matters if you're skilled enough at your job that your fascination doesn't suddenly and violently catch up with you, right? Right.

I don't think she really expects to be mourned when she eventually does go out. She suspects (incorrectly) that any sort of affectionate or fond treatment she receives from Viago is out of a professional interest in keeping her loyal to him, and that if she were to suddenly die his biggest concern would be the years of training that are now down the drain, which is. A hell of a way to feel about a guy who's been your father figure for roughly two decades! But hey, I call her the Maker's most emotionally unstable soldier for a reason. Their relationship is messy and complicated. Maybe she expects Teia to mourn a little, but hey, early death is the reality of being a Crow. The biggest thing she worries about is what will happen to Affogato, probably. Other than that? She does see herself as expendable. At least a little.

That is, until she meets the Lighthouse gang! And the experience of having friends who aren't also constantly shrouded in death and mortal peril their entire lives is...terrifying for her? I invite you to imagine yourself trying to rescue a panicked animal who seems determined to get itself killed rather than let you take care of it. What do you mean I have to worry about others worrying about me now? What do you mean to be loved is to be beholden to somebody besides yourself? I've already been given enough high stakes responsibility. This sucks, I liked it better when I was cannon fodder.

It's worse with Lucanis. Because now romantic love is factoring into that mix, and how is she supposed to navigate what that looks like? She's never been good at being held, and now she's supposed to pick that up on the fly and also confront the idea of what a future she was never supposed to get will look like? And the worst part is she did this to herself. She could have just not pursued him, but look where we are now. Classic certified grade-A idiot clown moment. It takes her a while to work through that one, including a period where she straight up almost leaves him because of it. But she doesn't! They get through it in the end.

So it's a trade-off, I guess. Death is a lot more real now but only because the things she stands to lose are much more precious.

[emojellyace08]

Lookism Men x Artist! Reader 🖤🥀🎨Part 2

Warnings: None Genre: fluff ☁️ Reader is gender neutral (and in an established relationship with the character of choice :)

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵︵‿

Hudson Ahn (Ahn Hyung-Seong)

He doesn't really mind about your hobby as long if it's nothing too weird or bothersome. What matters is that you're having fun and you're comfortable with it.

Hudson will also be curious on how you managed to draw things. I think he'll kind of get close to you when he sees you drawing body anatomy and sketches of fighting poses. He really thinks it's cool. He also thinks it's very creative when you draw Shonen manga like Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, etc. (I headcannon that Hudson watches anime secretly since he thinks that the fighting scenes are so cool). But no matter what art style you're using, Hudson thinks that you're really talented especially when you're passionate about it.

He also doesn't mind it if you asked him for a picture so you can use him as a reference photo. Sure, he has other things to do like training with Taesoo but he guessed that a little break is not really a bad idea. He'll be looking forward for the results while he's away training and not seeing you for who knows how long. Taesoo will ask what he did on his breaks and he'll simply reply "I just spend time with Y/N. She/he just asked me to be her/his model for her/his sketch before I go. It's fine I guess".

And after a really long time of not meeting each other because of his missions and personal problems, he'll visit you again after beating some fucker's ass. He'll ask about your progress and if you're already finished it will make him surprised (though it's not obvious). He knows that it takes a lot of time and patience to make a good artwork just like training for combat, but he guessed that you're just so responsible at managing your time or you're just really good at it. After you gave him the sketch for him to take a good look at it, he'll be surprised on how you did a good job and he'll compliment it "It looks pretty". "Tha-Thank you. I wonder if you would want me to take pictures of you, if you don't mind". "Sure I've got nothing to do anyways". And if he's not satisfied, he'll give constructive criticism on it (though he won't ask for you to draw a new portrait of him since he doesn't like it when you get burned out). He'll also ask you to keep it since he can't promise that he can preserve it's beauty because of his work.

Hudson is your number one fan even though it's not really obvious at times. You're his precious cinnamon roll that he'll protect whoever tries to mess with you :).

Eli Jang (Jang Hyun)

Also your number one biggest fan (he still prioritizes a nice and helpful partner, but also having a talented someone can make his heart explode).

He also finds your own artsyle amazing whether you draw anime/cartoonish, realism/semi-realism, landscape, abstract or gory/horror (though don't show your gory art to Yenna she may cry her eyes out lmao). I headcannon that Eli himself likes drawing. When he's younger and when he was struggling with his personal issues, he would either hum songs that his mother used to sing to him or he would draw a picture of what a happy family looks like since he never got to experienced to be raised in a loving and accepting place, though he never finds it as his future career. But drawing makes him calm and express his negative emotions on a simple paper, so having a partner who also shares the same hobby as him makes you and Eli's bond a bit stronger. He also really admires how you took a simple activity into the next level like drawing everyday things or events in your style and interpretation.

He also doesn't mind it when you asked him for a picture for you to use it as a reference photo. Though expect for him to snap a photo with him holding his baby with that sweetest smile ever (he'll only do it though when you're super close with him). And after giving him your work he'll put it on a frame that hangs up on their home along with other pictures of the Hostel Members and yourself since he just found you very special, especially when you give him something that you made by yourself (he's very sentimental). "You're hanging it up on the wall?" you asked as he smiles while looking at your artwork of him holding Yenna. "Of course. Your works are beautiful and it means so much to me. My family is the most important thing in my life. You, Yenna and the others are like precious gems that needs to be protected and be taken care of. So I'll do my best to protect you even if it means in hurting others so all of you will be safe" "Damn, you actually sound like my parent/s". you replied back as his eyes widened at your reaction as Eli chuckled at your response. "I'm Hostel's Big Daddy after all". "And that's why I love you".

Eli also appreciates it when you babysit Yenna and teaching her how to color! Since Eli's really busy and tired balancing his high school life and fighting the other crews who tries to mess with his family, sometimes he can get a bit lazy of taking care of the little girl (But I don't think that he's a careless father he still spends his extra time with Yenna). But taking turns with him of taking care of the girl can be a relief of him, (though he doesn't assign you for watching out his child since he understands that you need to study too and have your personal space but he'll trust you more if you take care of her). He might even join drawing with the both of you! It can be a special bond and activity that you, Eli and Yenna will do every time you're both free and in the mood to take a break (the others will join too but it can be a mess yet still very fun!). "Yenna you drew a snowman! It looks so cute!" "BA BA Y/N!".

Eli really value you as a really good and supportive partner, so supporting you on your hobby is no big deal either.

Warren Chae (Chae Won Seok)

Fanboy #3. Seriously, he thinks that your talent/hobby is so cool!

Warren finds it fascinating how you draw. He also likes the concentrated face that you make when you're too serious of sketching your reference and not getting it right. "Y/N (why do you look so annoyed?)" he will ask curiously and peek through your sketchbook as you hide it pressing the paper on your chest. "It's nothing" "I noticed that the nose looks weird (like a penis)". "WARREN!"

Just like Zack, he'll feel so special when you asked him for a picture as a reference photo. He'll be so awkward about it lmao (he secretly wants you to draw him anyways soooo....). He'll be posing like an idiot while you scold him for doing a bad job as your personal model. "C'mon Warren act natural." "Like this?" then he'll put his hand on the back of his head with a pouty look making you sigh (though he doesn't like you getting pissed off by him so he'll try his best to be obedient but he just can't take things seriously sometimes lol).

And he'll be so hyped and excited to see your progress! He'll ask about your work if its finished almost every time, "Y/N (How's) the sketch? Is it done?" "No Warren, I haven't finished it yet I just need to add some details." "Okie (I'll wait for it!)" And if you are done and you gave it to him, his eyes will be that emoji ✨🥺✨because he's so amazed that you did a very good job with it! "WOAH Y/N YOU REALLY SLAYED THIS!" "Ye-Yeah thanks".

He will also flex you on Sally, Eli, Derek, Max, Heather heck even Olly. "Y/N so good at drawing (she/he's my everything)". "Yeah, that's why you're such a simp for her/him." "HEY! (BE QUIET!)".

If Warren is one of the approved simps, he'll be also your fan. Just seeing you happy and progressing your talents/skills and also as a good person really warms his heart >3 (keep up the good work!).

Johan Seong (Seong Yohan)

Okay he looks so angsty in this picture though (I just wanna see him happy for once).

If you're childhood friends with him, he'll be in shock and awe on how you managed to draw cute things. "WoW Y/N how are you so good at these stuff?" "Ha... Well, you just need some practice and patience in anything that you do you know. I'm not really good at first but I managed to pass the beginner level I guess". He will also look up to you as a role model especially if he's crushing on you. "I wanna be cool like Y/N too so I'll practice boxing just like Zack is doing right now!" . But if you met him after the God Dog arc he'll be more quiet and reserved. I can imagine the scenario, you and Johan with his dogs will be on the same park while he stares at you sketching something. He will be blushing and he will look away when you noticed him watching you doing your own thing (he doesn't want you to feel uncomfortable). "Sorry are you alright sir?" "Ye-Yeah I'll go no-" "No it's alright really! There's no other seats in here and I noticed you watching me draw but it's okay." "You sure?" "Yeah. Your name?" and the rest is history.

Johan also doesn't mind it if you asked for a photo of him as a reference. Though I headcannon that he'll be mildly uncomfortable about it since he secretly feels insecure about himself. "You want a photo of me?" "Yes!" "What for?" he will ask bluntly but deep down he'll be screaming inside while his cheeks are rosy pink. His crush asking his photo? His day couldn't get any better. "Well I was out of ideas for my drawings and I thought that you'll be a perfect reference" you asked as he looks at you overthinking. What if you're secretly part of the Workers and you've been a spy all along so that you can share his information to Yoojin and destroy him. "Just promise me one thing." "Sure!" he leans closer to you making close contact making you blush. "You won't leak my photo everywhere, got it?" "Su-Sure. I promise".

He secretly likes it more when you draw him pictures of animals like dogs, especially Eden! (He's just like Vasco fr). "You drew this?" Johan asked checking out your work as you smiled back at him. "Yep! I think your dog is cute so I decided to draw her!" you replied cheerfully as he gave you a sly smirk, you look so cute when you give a happy expression to him it makes his day better. "Keep up the good work" Johan said while ruffling your hair.

Having a someone who is kind, warm hearted and also talented is a win for Johan. He can't help but to adore you!

[gacha99]

I haven't completed the entire chapter just yet however

I feel like the way this is described has something to do with the Storm itself. I've never heard of this before obviously (i am not a philosopher lol i just like anime and gacha games) but the way Arcanists and Humans function is similar to the cave allegory in a weird way. We've already learned that not only is there a physical difference between arcanists and humans, but that there's also a mental barrier between the two and that they quite literally perceive the world differently.

Humans use logic to make sense of the world, where as Arcanists use "arcanum" to make sense of the world. And that Arcanum manifests in just all different types of ways. We've seen it before in past events. In the Mor Pankh event, Kaalaa quite literally imagines a monster coming to get her as she tries to do her work diligently, and can conjure up small stars above her head that are clearly only visible to her.

And this newest event is called The Prisoner in the Cave, which is a direct reference to this allegory. I think that the Humans are the "Prisoners" in this supposed scenario and the Arcanists are the people who have the tools and the fire that cast the shadows on the wall they see.

Humans are limited in what they can perceive of the Arcanist world, but Arcanists see everything of the Human world, there's nothing stopping them from knowing about the science and logic that humans use.

This allegory actually has multiple parts and the second part sounds very much like how humans act and function. They cannot comprehend the Arcane world at all, and deny outright that its real even though they are faced with the knowledge of Arcanists being able to do things they can do.

There has always been a level of cognitive dissonance with the human characters in this game, because they know Arcanists are real and exist and that Arcanum is a thing that flows freely in their blood, but that they as humans will never be able to participate in or do. And because they can't do it, they will never really understand how it works, and because they can't reason their way into understanding Arcanum they just outright call it nonsense. Or ask for proof from Arcanists, when there's no proof that can really satisfy the human mind.

And I really think its this part that is really interesting when we think about Humans being the prisoner and the Arcanists being the "mastermind" behind the shadows

because there's only one real source of undeniable Arcanum that affects humans openly in a way they can't deny: The Storm.

After reading about this allegory, it made me wonder if the Storm was also a way to prove something to humans as a whole, to show them firsthand the power of Arcanum in a way they would be able to understand. It sounds like something Arcana would do anyways, she doesn't have any problem transforming random people into Manus drones whenever she feels like it.

And we know that when people are caught in the storm, what do they do? They transform into the very things that were most influential during that time period. They literally poof and abstract away in painting styles and words and even technology etc. It's confusing to look at, but to experience it would be undeniable.

[leeahqueen]

The Remaining Dust Trio (CER-03)

CER-03

By the time the Cerberus and friends pushed the car to a place that “looked” like a car repair shop, the sun was already slanting between the distant mountains and rocks.

Under the setting sun, standing outside a shed made of tattered plywood, a more casual and tattered highway plague had the words “Car Repair and Tire Repair Gourmet” crookedly painted in white.

The rags tangled on the shed and plague swayed the “guests” coming and going in the fine wind and sand.

And if the inference is correct, this plague should be a signboard for some kind of unspeakable product.

No.21: Can?

Noctis: Tsk… This can be useful. Little brats, stop reading.

No.21: Hiss….

Noctis: Is this really a place where cars are repaired? I feel like this car is worth more than this shabby shed.

Vera: Dark shop?

Noctis sneered and jumped out of the car seat.

Noctis: How dark is it?

No.21: Captain, it’s getting dark.

No.21 was lying on the roof of the car, hunched over, and stretching.

No.21: Hmm…it smells like engine oil here.

No.21: I don’t like it here.

Vera: Don’t waste time in a place like this.

Vera: Go ask and have the car repaired.

Noctis: Me? Huh? Why?

Noctis: I spend the most time pushing the car along this road, why should I do this kind of thing?

Vera: Don’t you want to know how dark it is?

Vera: The “Omnipotent” Noctis shouldn’t be able to handle such a small thing, right?

Vera mocked Noctis while sitting on the car seat where Noctis had been resting.

Noctis: C’mon, isn’t it just a bed thing? Let’s make an agreement first. If it goes wrong, don’t blame me.

Noctis: Wait, let’s me show you my communication skills.

Noctis shrugged, walked over the old tires, bearings and rubber pipes lying on the ground, and walked towards the dilapidated repair shed.

The bells jingled.

With a crash of metal parts, Noctis entered the house that looked dilapidated from the outside – even though it was also dilapidated inside.

Although the inside of the shed looks cleaner than the outside, the old copper-green glass cabinets and rusty doors and walls everywhere make it feel more comfortable than the outside.

The stronger smell of engine oil was mixed with the sour smell of rotting meat, almost condensing into water droplets, and dripping from the dim light bulb.

And some kind of classical music has been playing throughout the room, which is perverse and inconsistent with the room.

There is a man standing behind the glass counter. The apron on his body is almost the same as the palette in the painter’s hand. If he works hard, he will probably be sent to an art museum as the latest abstract artwork.

Noctis: Boss, fix the car.

The man didn’t seem to notice Noctis walking in. He just smoked quietly and looked at some unspeakable magazine in his hand.

The smoke rings rose to the top of the shed, trying desperately to escape from this terrible place, but in the end, they could only dissipate deep into the rust.

Noctis: Hey! I said I want to repair my car!

Boss: What to eat?

Noctis: Repair the car? Didn’t you hear?

Boss: If you want to repair your car, let’s order food first.

The boss took out a piece of plastic wrap covered with old stains from the glass cabinet and handed it to Noctis.

It was written in beautiful cursive characters—

              Authentic seafood stew! Satisfy all your imagination if the sea!

              Ham and mashed potato sandwich! A good companion for home and travel!

              Heart-warming special steak! Warm your stomach and heart!

Noctis: Is there any seafood here?

Boss: Yes, newly caught.

Noctis: ……

Noctis glanced at the iron hook hanging upside down from the roof on the other side of the shed. On it was a piece of blue-black meat that could no longer be identified as an “animal”.

Probably it’s seafood, ham, and steak.

Boss: Would you like to order this? Three thousand and five.

Noctis: I don’t want to eat, I’m here to repair my car!

Only then did the boss raise his head and look over his glasses at Noctis, who was standing in front of the counter.

Boss: Tsk, construct? No need to order.

Boss: This amount is cash only.

The boss stretched out his hand and tapped the price tag written crookedly on the cardboard behind him—

Noctis: Seventy-two thousand?

Boss: Cost price.

Boss: If you don’t want to repair your car here, there are car repair shops a hundred kilometers north.

The auto repair boss blew out a smoke ring again.

How could Noctis stand such a provocation, but his reason prevented him from punching out the glasses of the auto repair shop owner in front of him.

Neither he, No.21, nor Vera wanted to push the car for another hundred kilometers.

Thinking of this, Noctis deliberately placed his left hand on the glass counter, revealing his thick mechanical arm.

Noctis: Hey boss, do you know about the sky garden? Do you know about the Cerberus?

Boss: Haven’t.

The auto repair boss continued to flip through the magazine in his hand, as if he hadn’t seen Noctis’s robotic arm that could kill him with one punch.

Boss: A sky garden or an underworld garden, a Cerberus, or a headless dog, what does it have to do with me?

Noctis: [Beep]! You—

Boss: There are some troublemakers in the south. Go deal with them.

Noctis: Huh? Who do you think you are? How dare you instruct me like this!?

Boss: Pay it then.

The boss knocked on the cardboard behind him again.

Boss: If you don’t have the money, you must do what you’re told, do you understand?

Boss: Go and get rid of those things that are slowing down my business, and I’ll repair your car.

Noctis: ……. I feel really unhappy.

The sound made between Noctis clenched fists did not seem to be caused by his own annoyance. It seemed like the sound was caused by smashing the half-suspended glasses of the man in front of him.

Boss: It’s okay if you don’t want to go, but for the sake of what kind of underworld garden you are, I’ll give you a discount of one thousand or seventy thousand and give you a seafood stew.

The boss, however, still acted as if he hadn’t heard anything, and continued to look at his magazine in his hand with bold and unrestrained illustrations with relish.

Noctis: [Beep] Yes, you remember it.

Noctis: Cultivate well, you know! You will suffer if you fail to cultivate.

The bells jingled.

Vera: How about it?

Noctis: Do you have money? Cash.

Vera: Who brings cash when going on a mission?

Noctis: Where is 21? Doesn’t she have any money hidden in her sleeve?

No.21: Money? No need for it on No.21…

Vera: Is your head full of soaked dynamite? The Cerberus only has one account, idiot.

Noctis: Oh, I remembered…

Vera: I asked you how the conversation went!

Noctis: The boss who looked like a butcher said, go get him some infected bodies, and he will help us repair the car.

Vera: Well, go ahead. We’re just waiting here.

Noctis: What should I do? Do you have the money? Seventy-two thousand! And you must order some seafood that looks like a piece of shit for three thousand and five!

Vera: Only Cerberus are allowed to set prices for others, right? Noctis?

Vera said mockingly, but Noctis didn’t realize the anger in Vera’s words.

Noctis: I... I negotiated the price!

Vera: So?

Noctis: I negotiated the price down to 71,000 and got a free seafood stew, but I think it’s more cost-effective to go for some exercise, don’t you think?

Vera: … Very good, you should pay for it.

Vera almost crushed the flag gun in her hand.

No.21: Captain, your circulating fluid pressure is going to exceed the critical value.

Noctis: Otherwise… let’s talk to 21 instead.

Noctis: But that person didn’t seem to be afraid of us, nor the sky garden.

No.21: Because Noctis is just stupid and has nothing to be afraid of.

No.21: If No.21 goes there, I can say it’s 70,000.

Noctis: Your little brain is not as big as half a grenade—

In fact, the construct does not need to breathe, but at this moment, Vera’s M.I.N.D controlled her to take a long deep breath and spit it out again.

Vera: Where to go? I want to hit something right now.

Vera: Are you the bastards who want to make an enemy of Cerberus?

Vera: From now on, begin and cooperate, do you understand?

No.21: To cooperate with Noctis… hmph.

Noctis: Hey, I’m not having fun yet!

Vera: …I’d better do it first.

Although before this, the Cerberus would occasionally fight together, but for the three of them, it seemed that they had never fought so happily—

At least that’s how it is for Vera.

Noctis: Don’t we rarely fight together like this?

Vera: Right, after all, I have been cooperating with others on tasks before.

Noctis: Heh… it feels a bit cool.

No.21: Captain, can No.21 take these trophies back?

Vera: Huh? No problem, there’s no one else anyway.

No.21 was holding several parts of the infected body that were bent at quite weird angles. Probably because few people set foot in this uninhabited land, and the parts and models of the infected body are also very old.

Also due to the uninhabited land, the concentration of the Punishing here is relatively low, and the Punishing content in the infected body is far less than that of the enemies in the Punishing disaster area.

Noctis: We still have to fight, don’t you think, captain?

Noctis: Isn’t this much more comfortable? When I’m worried about the sky garden, I can only hit sandbags. It’s better to hit some real enemies.

Vera: You’re right. I’ll ask the Art Association to make me a batch of sandbags just like you did when I get back. It’s definitely more enjoyable to fight.

No.21: I want to try it too.

No.21: Tinpin Noctis becomes sandbags Noctis, sandbags, sandbags…

Vera: It’s a fool.

In this way, in the wasteland with only the Cerberus, the three of them talked and laughed and returned to the car shed.

At this time, the setting sun was almost completely below the horizon. In front of them was a car that had started its engine under the searchlight.

Noctis: Boss! Boss!

Boss: Tsk…

Noctis: Okay, you have something. We have already sorted them out for you, they are just a few trash fish.

Boss: Huh? You… it’s solved?

No.21: Also, the loot.

No.21 loaded the parts in her hands into the trunk, while the auto repair owner instinctively avoided No.21’s sharp claws and the mechanical mechanisms that still had a small amount of Punishing left.

Vera: Any questions?

Boss: Ah…ah. It’s okay, no problem.

Under the dim searchlight, Noctis and No.21 focused their attention on the car that had been repaired and had a lot of “decoration” added to it.

Boss: The car is repaired.

Vera: It’s really good quality and cheap, huh?

Boss: Uh…yeah.

The auto repair boss nervously wiped his hands with a rag that was not much cleaner than his own and smiled awkwardly.

Boss: Then I won’t delay you three. Welcome next time…

Vera: What?

Boss: No, I mean… feel free to skip it next time.

Boss: When it comes to repairing a car, it’s best not to break it, it’s best not to break it.

Read: CER-02 | CER-03 | CER-04

[saga-news-and-fandom]

People often interact with social, philosophical, or abstract concepts in a personal or visceral mindset. For example, reacting to a discussion about improving the biosphere through reduction of meat animal production as though it's improving my health by eating less meat.

But people react negatively to taking away something they enjoy.

In visceral, personal situations - let's switch to reducing sugar intake - reasonable arguments don't tend to encourage improved behavior, even with well thought out plans on how to improve.

But explaining that to improve a person's health there are recipes for really wonderful vegetables and that getting more of these will crowd out the bad impact things, (you'll be too full from balsamic charred broccoli and molé barbecue beans to crave chocolate cake) suddenly the visceral response is working towards the goal.

Back to policy: society, broadly speaking, will continue to respond negatively to conditions of removal of deleterious conditions. Instead, promotion of improved conditions can decrease demand for the undesirable ones, and a multi-pronged approach can succeed.

Slowly reduce subsidies for large scale, corporate animal meat production and divert those funds to subsidies for vegetarian alternatives.

Fund methods of popularizing satisfying and more ecologically sustainable foods, affecting advertising, entertainment, the restaurant industry, and especially prices in the supermarket.

Research and support sustainable practices in farming and ranching so that it ceases to be profitable to use the worst practices, and meat becomes an attainable luxury instead of a desirable staple.

And remember to have some compassion for impoverished people who have food restrictions to wheat, soy, flax, many grains and half of the "superfoods" out there who still deserve to thrive even as society at large is forced to make a shift.

Oh and remember that shareholders and CEOs are always going to resist these kinds of changes and put your anger where it belongs.

discussions about sustainability largely have to be in the realm of production, not consumption. while curbing wasteful consumption habits is important, issues of unsustainable goods can only be solved by literally producing less of them. this approach immediately resolves most issues with individualist, moral 'consumer activism' - for instance, it doesn't matter if you personally eat meat or not, but, factually, we need to significantly reduce the size of the animal agriculture industry if we want the earth to remain habitable. whenever you discuss this, a million scratched satisfascists start acting as though we intend to just take away their treats and replace them with nothing - as if the removal of personal automobiles doesn't go hand in hand with the redesigning of cities around walking and public transit, as if the removal of one method of production doesn't mean its replacement by another. the two main errors here, of the treatlerites, and of those who forget that socialism is supported by the people only because it improves their real conditions, should both be avoided.

[jcmarchi]

A CSS Wishlist for 2025

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/a-css-wishlist-for-2025/

A CSS Wishlist for 2025

2024 has been one of the greatest years for CSS: cross-document view transitions, scroll-driven animations, anchor positioning, animate to height: auto, and many others. It seems out of touch to ask, but what else do we want from CSS? Well, many things!

We put our heads together and came up with a few ideas… including several of yours.

Geoff’s wishlist

I’m of the mind that we already have a BUNCH of wonderful CSS goodies these days. We have so many wonderful — and new! — things that I’m still wrapping my head around many of them.

But! There’s always room for one more good thing, right? Or maybe room for four new things. If I could ask for any new CSS features, these are the ones I’d go for.

1. A conditional if() statement

It’s coming! Or it’s already here if you consider that the CSS Working Group (CSSWG) resolved to add an if() conditional to the CSS Values Module Level 5 specification. That’s a big step forward, even if it takes a year or two (or more?!) to get a formal definition and make its way into browsers.

My understanding about if() is that it’s a key component for achieving Container Style Queries, which is what I ultimately want from this. Being able to apply styles conditionally based on the styles of another element is the white whale of CSS, so to speak. We can already style an element based on what other elements it :has() so this would expand that magic to include conditional styles as well.

2. CSS mixins

This is more of a “nice-to-have” feature because I feel its squarely in CSS Preprocessor Territory and believe it’s nice to have some tooling for light abstractions, such as writing functions or mixins in CSS. But I certainly wouldn’t say “no” to having mixins baked right into CSS if someone was offering it to me. That might be the straw that breaks the CSS preprocessor back and allows me to write plain CSS 100% of the time because right now I tend to reach for Sass when I need a mixin or function.

I wrote up a bunch of notes about the mixins proposal and its initial draft in the specifications to give you an idea of why I’d want this feature.

3. // inline comments

Yes, please! It’s a minor developer convenience that brings CSS up to par with writing comments in other languages. I’m pretty sure that writing JavaScript comments in my CSS should be in my list of dumbest CSS mistakes (even if I didn’t put it in there).

4. font-size: fit

I just hate doing math, alright?! Sometimes I just want a word or short heading sized to the container it’s in. We can use things like clamp() for fluid typesetting, but again, that’s math I can’t be bothered with. You might think there’s a possible solution with Container Queries and using container query units for the font-size but that doesn’t work any better than viewport units.

Ryan’s wishlist

I’m just a simple, small-town CSS developer, and I’m quite satisfied with all the new features coming to browsers over the past few years, what more could I ask for?

5. Anchor positioning in more browsers!

I don’t need anymore convincing on CSS anchor positioning, I’m sold! After spending much of the month of November learning how it works, I went into December knowing I won’t really get to use it for a while.

As we close out 2024, only Chromium-based browsers have support, and fallbacks and progressive enhancements are not easy, unfortunately. There is a polyfill available (which is awesome), however, that does mean adding another chunk of JavaScript, contrasting what anchor positioning solves.

I’m patient though, I waited a long time for :has to come to browsers, which has been “newly available” in Baseline for a year now (can you believe it?).

6. Promoting elements to the #top-layer without popover?

I like anchor positioning, I like popovers, and they go really well together!

The neat thing with popovers is how they appear in the #top-layer, so you get to avoid stacking issues related to z-index. This is probably all most would need with it, but having some other way to move an element there would be interesting. Also, now that I know that the #top-layer exists, I want to do more with it — I want to know what’s up there. What’s really going on?

Well, I probably should have started at the spec. As it turns out, the CSS Position Layout Module Level 4 draft talks about the #top-layer, what it’s useful for, and ways to approach styling elements contained within it. Interestingly, the #top-layer is controlled by the user agent and seems to be a byproduct of the Fullscreen API.

Dialogs and popovers are the way to go for now but, optimistically speaking, these features existing might mean it’s possible to promote elements to the #top-layer in future ways. This very well may be a coyote/roadrunner-type situation, as I’m not quite sure what I’d do with it once I get it.

7. Adding a layer attribute to <link> tags

Personally speaking, Cascade Layers have changed how I write CSS. One thing I think would be ace is if we could include a layer attribute on a <link> tag. Imagine being able to include a CSS reset in your project like:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdn.com/some/reset.css" layer="reset">

Or, depending on the page visited, dynamically add parts of CSS, blended into your cascade layers:

<!-- Global styles with layers defined, such as: @layer reset, typography, components, utilities; --> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles/main.css"> <!-- Add only to pages using card components --> <link rel="stylesheet" href="/components/card.css" layer="components">

This feature was proposed over on the CSSWG’s repo, and like most things in life: it’s complicated.

Browsers are especially finicky with attributes they don’t know, plus definite concerns around handling fallbacks. The topic was also brought over to the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) for discussion as well, so there’s still hope!

Juandi’s Wishlist

I must admit this, I wasn’t around when the web was wild and people had hit counters. In fact, I think I am pretty young compared to your average web connoisseur. While I do know how to make a layout using float (the first web course I picked up was pretty outdated), I didn’t have to suffer long before using things like Flexbox or CSS Grid and never grinded my teeth against IE and browser support.

So, the following wishes may seem like petty requests compared to the really necessary features the web needed in the past — or even some in the present. Regardless, here are my three petty requests I would wish to see in 2025:

8. Get the children count and index as an integer

This is one of those things that you swear it should already be possible with just CSS. The situation is the following: I find myself wanting to know the index of an element between its siblings or the total number of children. I can’t use the counter() function since sometimes I need an integer instead of a string. The current approach is either hardcoding an index on the HTML:

<ul> <li style="--index: 0">Milk</li> <li style="--index: 1">Eggs</li> <li style="--index: 2">Cheese</li> </ul>

Or alternatively, write each index in CSS:

li:nth-child(1) --index: 0; li:nth-child(2) --index: 1; li:nth-child(3) --index: 2;

Either way, I always leave with the feeling that it should be easier to reference this number; the browser already has this info, it’s just a matter of exposing it to authors. It would make prettier and cleaner code for staggering animations, or simply changing the styles based on the total count.

Luckily, there is a already proposal in Working Draft for sibling-count() and sibling-index() functions. While the syntax may change, I do hope to hear more about them in 2025.

ul > li background-color: hsl(sibling-count() 50% 50%); ul > li transition-delay: calc(sibling-index() * 500ms);

9. A way to balance flex-wrap

I’m stealing this one from Adam Argyle, but I do wish for a better way to balance flex-wrap layouts. When elements wrap one by one as their container shrinks, they either are left alone with empty space (which I don’t dislike) or grow to fill it (which hurts my soul):

I wish for a more native way of balancing wrapping elements:

It’s definitely annoying.

10. An easier way to read/research CSSWG discussions

I am a big fan of the CSSWG and everything they do, so I spent a lot of time reading their working drafts, GitHub issues, or notes about their meetings. However, as much as I love jumping from link to link in their GitHub, it can be hard to find all the related issues to a specific discussion.

I think this raises the barrier of entry to giving your opinion on some topics. If you want to participate in an issue, you should have the big picture of all the discussion (what has been said, why some things don’t work, others to consider, etc) but it’s usually scattered across several issues or meetings. While issues can be lengthy, that isn’t the problem (I love reading them), but rather not knowing part of a discussion existed somewhere in the first place.

So, while it isn’t directly a CSS wish, I wish there was an easier way to get the full picture of the discussion before jumping in.

What’s on your wishlist?

We asked! You answered! Here are a few choice selections from the crowd:

Rotate direct background-images, like background-rotate: 180deg

CSS random(), with params for range, spread, and type

A CSS anchor position mode that allows targeting the mouse cursor, pointer, or touch point positions

A string selector to query a certain word in a block of text and apply styling every time that word occurs

A native .visually-hidden class.

position: sticky with a :stuck pseudo

Wishing you a great 2025…

CSS-Tricks trajectory hasn’t been the most smooth these last years, so our biggest wish for 2025 is to keep writing and sparking discussions about the web. Happy 2025!

[thegospelofstjohn]

"The Bustard." From the Gospel of Saint John, 7: 25-29.

Like we, the ancients struggled over the proper definition of Jesus. He was not like Moses or Achilles, or Jason or any of the other mythical sightings and soundings the people had ever encountered. John attempts to explain as Jesus contains an element found only in the East, made well known by the Bhagavad Gita and stories about King Ram. The topic called pratyahara, actionlessness explains how one does work but does no work on the Sabbath.

Pratyahara, actionlessness "the abstraction of work" results when the desires of the Spirit triumph over the desires of the flesh. Now we know the Self cannot be found during abstience. Abstinence reveals the true callings of the Self, the ones which are necessary. The key to understanding abstraction is found in the next frame of the Gospel of John. Jesus says His soul was sent by God in secret for the sake of public purposes.

We know what a man is, we've all seen one. But we do not know why a man is how he is. A wicked man, an animal man we say is subject to his savage animal instincts. Even if you put such a man in a space shuttle, he will still compete with God, nature and other creatures for the sake of satisfying his delusions, to keep them alive and make them real.

A man, a real one will conjoin with society as it satisfies his understandng of his desires to be happy. As one forsakes the wicked animal mind and applies work for the sake of future happiness, we say the effort becomes more abstract as no one can tell one how to do it, it must be learned through intense training of the intuition.

We have long since been teaching boys not to touch each others pensis, but they can handle as many guns, grenades, missiles, and murder as many other men as they like. No one knows why touching a penis makes us happy, it is how God made us it is not worth lengthy discussion. We know exactly why touching a gun hurts others but we do not discuss this at all. This conflict is the opposite of the divine law of Pratyahara, of which Jesus was a fan.

There is never an inopportune moment to discuss non-violence or ritually pure practices that will improve the success of society. Jesus was "at that point" during the Roman occupation, we are well past ours. I cannot seem to get the world to obey the Script and lower its weapons, respect other persons and repair the damage to the land. This is perplexing. Following is how Jesus addressed the same confusion he encountered in Jerusalem long ago.

John says all righteousness is founded in the temple courts, the aspect of religion that determine moral decision making. Jesus makes his stand there:

Division Over Who Jesus Is

25 At that point some of the people of Jerusalem began to ask, “Isn’t this the man they are trying to kill? 26 Here he is, speaking publicly, and they are not saying a word to him. Have the authorities really concluded that he is the Messiah? 

27 But we know where this man is from; when the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from.”

28 Then Jesus, still teaching in the temple courts, cried out, “Yes, you know me, and you know where I am from. I am not here on my own authority, but he who sent me is true. You do not know him, 29 but I know him because I am from him and he sent me.”

How to know the Gnoss, Nasa in Hebrew that which by all things are known requires a test. The etymology states what is pure must be separated from what is impure, things have to be sweated out.

The result is Nasa II:

"The verb נסס (nasas II) is listed to denote a being elevated or conspicuous, but here at Abarim Publications we guess it means to solidify and especially in some kind of form: to cast. It occurs only twice: Psalm 60:4 observes that YHWH has given his people a banner (נס) in order to נסס (nasas). Most translations think this banner has to be "raised," but we think this banner denotes the command to dissolve battle formations and commence a rapid retreat towards the banner.

Zechariah 9:16 speaks of precious stones that are in some way related to a crown. Tradition thinks these stones are elevated or conspicuous, but we think they were smelted into the metal of the crown; flush with its surface.

This verb's only derivative is the masculine noun נס (nes), denoting a symbol of some sort; a rallying banner or flag (Isaiah 30:17, Jeremiah 4:6).

The central idea behind these flags was not that they were elevated, but that they provided stationary anchors for swarms of people to gather around, either literally or figuratively around their message (Jeremiah 50:2). The bronze serpent which Moses made was placed upon such a נס (nes; Numbers 21:8)."

We know life comes from a central fiery furnace, a forge. John states this eloquently in the beginning of his Gospel it is a Talmud on the same passages found in the beginning of the Torah. Jesus says a man is the product of the Word the Light and the Flesh working in reverse. We must get to know the flesh to know God we must get to know God to understand the mysteries of the flesh. The flesh cannot be explained to us without the abstract thinking given to us by the Word. This is the Pratyahara.

We can get to know God, He is easily explained. We cannot get to know the Self or Selves but through inference. There is no other way possible, no action that can be taken, no rule that can be followed, there is no math problem to solve. God creates us using a concrete science, but the creation of the Self is not at all a product of what is said to be so concrete. This is how the Division in Christ is made.

The Values in Gematria are:

v. 25-26: There aren't words. The Number is 9728, טזבח‎, tazbech, "sacrifice the killing." "leave the past behind."

v. 27: We know, but no one else will know. This is the problem. Realized individuals leave other people alone. They don't cheat in elections or break laws or fuchk their own kids or give babies drugs, they are fully functional in their pursuits of their Seven Days. The Number is 8635, ח‎וגה, "circle the dial like a bustard or a woodlark."

v. 28-29: I know him because I am from him and he sent me. The Number is 15041, אןםא, annemha, "the concept that opens both eyes."

So the theoretical object of the Gospel of John is to use Jewish sight not to see all around or up or down, but to see through and around the spectrum of the Seven Days panoramically, like one is at the center of a kaleidoscope.

This according to the Torah and also to Jesus requires little or no work. I am very pleased with this because it gives us a clear channel out of this dark age caused by the Roman Catholic Church, made light by the very thing they refused to see.

*pictured, a bustard, another kind of peacock.

[will-o-theforce]

E. Willow presents

The Pokémon Series: Part 1

Under the cut: Vaporeon, Pikachu, Sylveon, Umbreon, Jolteon, Delcatty, Mismagius, Eevee

*There are signature inconsistencies in early works

Vaporeon

My first attempt at Pokémon art. I know nothing of the games or the anime, so this was an interesting challenge in trying to make those lines and edges as clean as possible.

The background design, done entirely with posca pens, was inspired by those “how to draw water” videos you see on TikTok.

Pikachu

Not my favourite. Pikachu is adorable, but not particularly challenging. This piece also presents a plethora of rookie mistakes that I’m not proud of, but I maintain that they’ve been helpful in developing a more consistent technique

Sylveon

She is my everything and I’ll love her for all eternity. An incredible challenge! Not only did I make so many mistakes that I had to fix, but consistently mixing all those different shades of pink that stood out from one another induced an entirely new level of rage for me.

This was when I really started leaning into the idea of really abstract background designs. My research showed Sylveon is a peaceful type Pokémon, who has attacks, but prefers to stay largely nonviolent, and I wanted this to show. I wanted to call to the movement of her body in the lines, and also really allow her to pop with the bubbles filling up those big empty spaces.

Umbreon

Screaming crying throwing up. So cute! But also a huge pain in my ass! Do you know how hard it is to find a full body pose reference for this little dude? SO HARD! I also think literally all of his attacks are ugly, but I found this one card that had these little stars and some white lightning lines, so I thought that’d be an awesome concept to explore, especially with bringing those background designs to the foreground.

I think he could’ve popped more if the background had been maybe yellow or red to highlight those colour points on his body, but I think he works like this.

Jolteon

YES. He is beauty, he is grace, the very visible mistake corrections are slapping me in the face. The lovely thing about acrylic is that them mistakes are SEEN. I still love him though. I think his line art would’ve been the most difficult with all those sharp points.

Jolteon is when I decided to be very conscious of posing and placement. With the others, you can see some deliberate choices, but not all of the previous paintings were this carefully thought out. I like the idea of having the determined attack pose, or with the peaceful ones, a flowing pose with lots of movement implications. Movement is one of my favourite things to display in my more abstract designs. Here it’s very prominent in the step forward sparking out and back.

Delcatty

I wanted to try something with the clean border. I think as a whole, I like the painted edges more because the bright white border tends to highlight those empty spaces rather than letting the empty spaces bring out the figure.

This was my fastest attempt, having been started and completed within about 3 hours including drying time. I think the background should have been a shade darker to allow for those purple motifs in Delcatty to really pop, but there’s also something kind of satisfying about the way parts of the figure blend into the background.

I was so lost on how to display Delcatty’s attack, so I decided to use those movement lines and bubbles extending out from the front to make it seem as though her shout is a power in itself. Almost like you’d see in manga or comic when a character is all caps-ing. I also liked the idea of adding individual movement lines to the tail, because my cat has a tail that flickers and moves a lot when he’s vocal.

Mismagius

Again with the border, but something about it worked here that didn’t with Delcatty, and I think it’s because of how filled up the space is. I saw the eye motif on one of Mismagius’ cards while I was researching and thought it’d be such a cool addition, and the way it brings attention to her actual eyes is an awesome bonus.

Colour theory kicked my ass with this one. You see those black shadows on the hat and one of her limbs? That shit is violet. But because of the background being that super deep plum violet, it comes out almost black. You have to shine a light on it to see the purple.

This one was a 3am crash course in How Badly Do I Wanna Screw My Sleep Schedule. It’s bad yall.

Eevee

This was a commissioned piece and is definitely my favourite of the bunch. The browns just really work together, and I love the honey colour of his eyes. I also love the almost front-facing determined pose with the movement lines and dots going up from the back and following the curve of the tail. I’m also quite happy with how the top left space doesn’t feel like “empty space” even though there’s nothing there. It brings more attention to Eevee himself without overcrowding or leaving it too empty. A good balance.

I also finally figured out my signature with this one, so hooray for me!

[fipindustries]

oh well you are in luck because i am such an artist and i can attempt to explain myself.

but first let me clarify, most of what i make is made to be legible at the very least. its made so that its all there in a language that can be read. i dont make abstract or conceptual art. all my art is figurative. now with that said, i dont often think too hard about what i want people to get out of my work

i create in a sense of "if you build it they will come". im lighting a beacon, whoever gets it gets it, if it happens to speak to them, even in ways that i did not intend then great. in fact i hope it speaks to them in ways i didnt intend. that is what's fascinating to me. here, i regurgitated this thing, what do you make of it. im getting to know myself from different eyes but also i get to know them.

yes, it feels great when someone *gets me*. when i feel like someone read my mind, when through my art i discover others who are my kindred. its alway a pleasure to be understod. but ultimatly i think of my work as a rorshach test. there are no wrong answers. its a radar signal. whatever weird unexpected echoes it bounces back from other minds are always a delight.

furthermore, there are many things ive created which i created almost exclusively for me. and yes, there are many different things that motivated me to do so. usually the main motivator is as raw as "i just want this thing to exist". the idea of this artefact being brought out of my head and into the real world, to be able to experience it with not just my inner eye but to truly see it in front of me and feel it and touch it and hear it.

in the truest of senses im just tickling myself. is almost an in-joke that appeals to the weird little culture that developed inside my brain.

another reason is the excercise itself of creation is often satisfying to me. i will draw and ink a piece or execute an animation simply because i just enjoy the process itself of constructing something without really caring that much about what the finished product might be.

silly post ahead, dont take it like super seriously or anything:

one thing modern progressivism, specifically on queer topics, has ruined a little bit is gender bending stories.

like, the trans reading or framing does take away a bit of the mysticism and intrigue and transgressiveness from something like ranma, for example.

(and i have to clarify i am a trans woman who spends most of her time on tumblr surrounded by other trans friends, with a trans girlfriend who is constantly moving around queer spaces. i get that in other contexts trans themes are still very much edgy and risque but, well, that hasnt been the reality in my circles for years now, lol.)

when reading a gender bend story i find it so much more salacious and tittilating if its framed in the old cist het mindset of "this is a boy... but perhaps something else??? something weirder and more confusing??? a boy sometimes can be a girl and viceversa??? what is going on here???"

whereas now there is no mystery to it, i can simply allocate it to one of the common and well understood boxes of "oh they trans, oh they identify as a girl, oh they are gender fluid, oh they are nonbinary, oh they just like to crossdress".

i dunno, i feel like ray bradbury here, complaining that modernity has stolen the numinous, the liminal, the mysterious and romantic out of this world with its prosaic understandings. i find the confusion, the inner conflict, the limerence of it all much more interesting than the realization or the understanding or the coming to terms.

like, once a trans girl finishes transitioning and has passing and is living her life as she always wanted what you get is just a girl. a normal girl. an understood quantity. and i mean, cool, good for her. im glad she is living her truth but the fun part is over.