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techit-rp · 2 months ago

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The Real-World Magic of Generative AI: 10 Ways It’s Changing 2025

In 2025, Generative AI is no longer a distant tech marvel—it’s a real-world force disrupting industries, transforming workflows, and amplifying human creativity. From streamlining business operations to generating art and improving healthcare, the reach of generative AI has expanded rapidly, touching nearly every aspect of our lives.

If you’re curious about what generative AI actually does in the wild—or wondering why Generative AI courses in Bengaluru are filling up fast—this blog will give you a comprehensive look at how this transformative technology is shaping the present and future.

Let’s explore the top 10 real-world applications of generative AI in 2025 that you absolutely need to know.

1. Content Creation for Marketing and Media

From writing SEO blogs and social media captions to crafting compelling ad copy, generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, and Copy.ai are supercharging marketing teams.

In 2025, companies are using AI not just to generate content, but also to optimize it for different channels, languages, and audience segments. Creative professionals can now focus more on strategy and storytelling while AI handles the repetitive drafts.

Why it matters: Brands save time and scale content production dramatically without sacrificing quality.

2. AI-Generated Art and Design

Tools like DALL·E, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion are redefining what it means to be an artist. Whether it’s graphic design, 3D modeling, or even textile pattern creation, designers are collaborating with AI to generate stunning visuals in seconds.

Even architectural firms and urban planners use generative AI to visualize complex structures, mood boards, and interior layouts during ideation phases.

Why it matters: Design cycles are faster, more experimental, and often more cost-effective.

3. Music and Audio Production

Generative AI is making waves in the music industry by composing melodies, writing lyrics, and producing entire tracks based on mood, style, or even voice cloning.

Musicians, podcasters, and sound designers use tools like Amper Music, Aiva, and Boomy to explore new sonic landscapes—and even customize soundtracks for commercial use.

Why it matters: It democratizes music creation and opens new avenues for artists and content creators.

4. Healthcare: Drug Discovery and Diagnosis

In 2025, generative AI plays a crucial role in bioinformatics and pharmaceuticals. AI models simulate the structure of new molecules, predict drug interactions, and even generate synthetic patient data for faster clinical trials.

Generative models also assist radiologists by generating and enhancing medical images for quicker diagnosis.

Why it matters: Drug development becomes faster and more affordable, with life-saving potential.

5. Finance: Report Generation and Market Analysis

In the financial sector, generative AI is used to automate routine tasks like generating investment reports, summarizing earnings calls, and even simulating economic scenarios.

AI-generated insights and forecasts help analysts make data-driven decisions quickly.

Why it matters: It saves countless hours and minimizes human error in data-heavy environments.

6. Gaming and Virtual Worlds

Video game developers are harnessing generative AI to build levels, design characters, write dialogue, and even adapt gameplay in real time based on user behavior.

In 2025, AI-generated non-playable characters (NPCs) now react more dynamically, making gameplay more immersive.

Why it matters: Developers build richer, more complex worlds with less manual effort.

7. Education: Personalized Learning Content

Generative AI is revolutionizing the classroom by creating customized quizzes, study materials, lesson plans, and even tutoring experiences tailored to each student’s learning style and pace.

Teachers use AI to auto-generate lesson summaries or convert complex topics into bite-sized learning nuggets.

Why it matters: It enhances learning accessibility and supports teachers in content delivery.

8. E-commerce: AI Product Descriptions and Visuals

E-commerce platforms use generative AI to automatically create product descriptions, reviews, and even augmented images for thousands of items.

Some AI systems even generate customer personas and simulate user behavior to A/B test new offerings.

Why it matters: Retailers scale up faster while maintaining consistent branding and personalization.

9. Legal and Compliance Document Drafting

Legal teams are using generative AI to draft contracts, summarize legal cases, and flag potential compliance risks. Tools trained on legal language now generate first drafts of agreements in seconds.

While final reviews still require human expertise, the groundwork is handled by AI.

Why it matters: It drastically reduces time spent on legal documentation and improves accuracy.

10. Film and Scriptwriting

Writers and filmmakers now brainstorm with AI co-writers. Generative AI can create characters, plots, and dialogue based on themes and genres. It can even convert written scripts into animated previews or voiceovers.

Some studios now use AI to test audience reactions to multiple storylines before choosing a direction.

Why it matters: It accelerates creative development and opens storytelling to a broader range of creators.

Why Learn Generative AI Today?

With such widespread use across industries, the demand for skilled professionals who understand generative AI is skyrocketing. And if you’re based in India’s tech capital, you’re in luck.

🌐 Generative AI Courses in Bengaluru: A Gateway to the Future

Bengaluru—India’s innovation hub—is quickly becoming the go-to destination for mastering cutting-edge technologies. Reputed institutes now offer Generative AI courses in Bengaluru that combine theoretical learning with practical, project-based experiences.

Whether you're a content creator, developer, designer, or data analyst, these courses help you:

Understand the fundamentals of generative models like GANs and LLMs

Build real-world applications using tools like ChatGPT, MidJourney, and Runway ML

Learn ethical implications and responsible AI practices

Prepare for careers in tech, media, healthcare, and beyond

The best part? Many of these programs are flexible, with online or hybrid formats tailored for working professionals.

Final Thoughts: AI Is Your New Creative Partner

Generative AI isn’t about replacing humans—it’s about empowering us to do more, think bigger, and innovate faster. From streamlining workflows to opening up new realms of creativity, its real-world impact in 2025 is undeniable.

So, whether you're a student, professional, or entrepreneur, now is the perfect time to explore how generative AI can boost your skillset—and your career.

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digi-marketing1 · 7 months ago

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Transform Your Smile at Sweet Smiles: The Trusted Dental Office in Las Vegas, NV

Introduction

Your smile is one of the first things people notice about you—it’s your signature! But what happens when you’re not confident about it? That’s where Sweet Smiles Dental Office in Las Vegas, NV, steps in. Whether you’re seeking a simple cleaning or a complete smile makeover, Sweet Smiles is here to ensure your teeth stay healthy and stunning. Known for their warm, patient-centered approach, this dental office goes above and beyond to create a positive experience for every visitor.

Schedule an appointment at Sweet Smiles Today!!!

About Sweet Smiles: Your Trusted Dental Office in Las Vegas, NV

Nestled in the heart of Las Vegas, Sweet Smiles has built a reputation as a trusted hub for exceptional dental care. From routine check-ups to advanced cosmetic procedures, they cater to every patient’s unique needs. Their friendly atmosphere and cutting-edge techniques make Sweet Smiles a go-to destination for locals seeking a reliable dental office near me. The office thrives on fostering a community of happy, healthy smiles.

Comprehensive Dental Services Offered

At Sweet Smiles, variety is the name of the game. Here’s what they offer:

General Dentistry: Routine cleanings, cavity fillings, and oral exams.

Cosmetic Dentistry: Elevate your smile with whitening treatments, veneers, and orthodontics.

Preventive Care: Stay ahead of oral health issues with regular cleanings and dental sealants.

Restorative Treatments: Say goodbye to damaged teeth with implants, crowns, and bridges.

With these services, Sweet Smiles ensures that you can maintain both the appearance and health of your teeth.

Meet the Experienced Team of Dentists in Las Vegas, NV

The backbone of Sweet Smiles is their highly qualified team of dentists in Las Vegas, NV. Each dentist brings years of expertise and a deep commitment to patient care. They understand that dental visits can sometimes feel daunting and work tirelessly to ensure every patient feels at ease. Personalized care plans and transparent communication are central to their practice.

Convenient Location: Dental Office Near Me

Located in a prime spot in Las Vegas, Sweet Smiles is a dental office near me that’s both accessible and welcoming. Whether you’re a resident or a visitor in the area, the clinic’s central location and ample parking make it easy to prioritize your oral health. Modern amenities and a relaxed environment further enhance the experience.

Why Choose Sweet Smiles as Your Dentist Near Me?

Why should you opt for Sweet Smiles over other dental offices? Here’s what sets them apart:

Patient-Centered Care: Your comfort and needs are their top priorities.

State-of-the-Art Technology: With advanced tools like 3D imaging, your treatment is more precise and efficient.

Affordable Pricing: They offer flexible payment plans and accept most major insurance providers.

Expanding Care: Dentist in Henderson, NV

Get in Touch with Us!!!

Living in Henderson, NV, doesn’t mean you can’t access Sweet Smiles’ incredible services. The clinic also extends its top-tier care to the neighboring area, ensuring you receive the same level of excellence as their Las Vegas patients.

Transformative Cosmetic Dentistry Services

Dreaming of a Hollywood-worthy smile? Sweet Smiles specializes in cosmetic dentistry that transforms lives.

Teeth Whitening: Brighten your teeth for a radiant smile.

Veneers: Achieve a flawless look by correcting imperfections.

Orthodontics: Explore Invisalign or traditional braces to straighten your teeth.

Preventive Dentistry: Keeping Your Smile Healthy

Prevention is always better than cure! Sweet Smiles focuses heavily on preventive care to keep dental problems at bay. Regular cleanings, fluoride treatments, and personalized oral hygiene advice are cornerstones of their practice.

Restorative Dentistry for Lasting Solutions

Dealing with damaged or missing teeth? Sweet Smiles offers solutions that stand the test of time:

Dental Implants: Durable replacements for missing teeth.

Crowns and Bridges: Restore both functionality and aesthetics.

Root Canals: Painless solutions for infected teeth.

Advanced Technology at Sweet Smiles

The clinic’s commitment to innovation means they employ the latest technologies to enhance patient care. From digital X-rays to laser treatments, they make every procedure safer, quicker, and more comfortable.

Patient Testimonials and Reviews

Patients rave about Sweet Smiles, often citing their compassionate team and life-changing results. Testimonials highlight the clinic’s exceptional customer service and the genuine care provided by the dentists.

Flexible Payment Options for Your Convenience

No one should have to choose between their smile and their budget. Sweet Smiles makes dental care accessible with flexible financing, including insurance partnerships and payment plans tailored to your needs.

Booking an Appointment Made Easy

Scheduling an appointment at Sweet Smiles is a breeze. You can book online, call the office, or even walk in for emergency dental care.

Conclusion

Transforming your smile has never been easier. With its top-notch services, experienced team, and patient-first approach, Sweet Smiles is undoubtedly the go-to dental office in Las Vegas, NV. Whether you’re in Las Vegas or nearby Henderson, NV, Sweet Smiles promises a dental experience like no other. Don’t wait—let Sweet Smiles help you achieve the smile you’ve always dreamed of.

#dental office in las vegas #dental office near me #dentist in las vegas #dentist near me

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embroidery-pro · 1 year ago

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The best Embroidery free software

Embroidery is a beautiful and intricate art form that has been around for centuries. With the advent of technology, embroidery has become easier and more accessible to everyone. Embroidery software allows you to create beautiful designs on your computer, which can then be transferred to your embroidery machine. However, many embroidery software programs can be expensive, which can be a barrier for many people who are just starting out. In this article, we'll explore the best embroidery free software options that can help you create beautiful embroidery designs without breaking the bank. -

Ink/Stitch

Ink/Stitch is a free and open-source embroidery software that allows you to create and edit embroidery designs in a variety of file formats. It is compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems and can be used with most embroidery machines. Ink/Stitch is user-friendly and offers a variety of features, such as fill stitching, satin stitching, and applique. Unveiling the Power of Open-Source Embroidery Digitizing Ink/Stitch's open-source nature empowers users to create and share embroidery designs without the constraints of licensing fees or proprietary formats. This democratizes the embroidery digitizing process, enabling individuals to access and contribute to the ever-growing community of designers. Key Features for Creative Embroidery Ink/Stitch packs a remarkable array of features to cater to a wide range of embroidery needs. Its comprehensive toolset allows users to: Import and edit graphic files from various formats, including SVG, PNG, and EPS, making it effortless to incorporate existing designs or personal creations into embroidery projects. Generate a variety of embroidery stitches, including satin, outline, fill, and backstitch variations, ensuring that the desired texture and details are captured in the digitized design. Customize stitch parameters to fine-tune the appearance of the embroidery, adjusting stitch length, width, and density to achieve the desired aesthetic. Optimize designs for different embroidery machines, ensuring compatibility with specific machine settings and needle types. Beyond Digitizing: A Gateway to Creative Expression Ink/Stitch's versatility extends beyond mere digitizing, enabling users to explore creative avenues: Convert existing images into embroidered designs, transforming photographs, illustrations, or even hand-drawn sketches into wearable masterpieces. Design personalized patches for clothing, hats, bags, or any other surface, adding a touch of individuality and flair. Create custom embroidery fonts for personalized text elements, adding a unique touch to monograms, quotes, or greetings. A Community-Driven Ecosystem The Ink/Stitch community fosters collaboration and knowledge sharing among users. Online forums and documentation provide valuable resources for beginners and experienced designers alike. Additionally, a vibrant marketplace offers a wealth of user-created embroidery designs, expanding the creative possibilities. Embrace the Freedom of Open-Source Embroidery Ink/Stitch stands as a testament to the power of open-source software, empowering individuals to express their creativity without the limitations of commercial constraints. Its comprehensive features, community support, and diverse creative applications make it an invaluable tool for embroidery enthusiasts of all levels. So, embark on a journey of embroidery digitizing with Ink/Stitch and unleash your creative potential! -

SewArt

SewArt is a free embroidery software that allows you to create and edit embroidery designs in a variety of file formats. It is compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems and can be used with most embroidery machines. SewArt offers a variety of features, such as auto-digitizing, manual digitizing, and image conversion. It also includes a variety of stitch types, such as fill stitching, satin stitching, and applique.

SewArt: A Versatile Embroidery Digitizing Software for Creative Expression

In the world of embroidery, SewArt stands as a popular and versatile software solution for converting images into embroidery designs. Developed by S&S Computing, SewArt offers a user-friendly interface and a comprehensive suite of features, making it suitable for both beginners and experienced embroiderers. Ease of Use and Intuitive Interface SewArt's user-friendly interface simplifies the embroidery digitizing process, making it accessible to users of all skill levels. The software's clear navigation and intuitive design allow you to seamlessly import, edit, and create embroidery designs without extensive training. Powerful Image Conversion and Stitch Generation SewArt excels in converting images of various formats, including JPEG, PNG, GIF, SVG, WMF, and EMF, into high-quality embroidery designs. Its advanced image conversion engines accurately capture the details of your designs, ensuring that the final embroidery stitches are rendered beautifully. SewArt boasts a comprehensive range of embroidery stitches, including satin, outline, fill, and backstitch variations. These stitches enable you to create intricate designs with a variety of textures and effects, adding depth and dimension to your embroidery projects. Thorough Design Editing and Customization SewArt provides a suite of powerful editing tools that allow you to refine and personalize your embroidery designs. You can adjust stitch parameters, change color palettes, and modify design elements to achieve the desired aesthetic. Compatibility with Wide Range of Embroidery Machines SewArt seamlessly integrates with a vast array of embroidery machines, ensuring compatibility with various settings and needle types. This compatibility allows you to directly transfer your digitized designs to your embroidery machine for flawless stitching. Additional Features for Enhanced Creativity Beyond basic digitizing, SewArt offers additional features that expand your creative possibilities: Auto-digitizing tools: These tools simplify the process of converting raster and vector images into embroidery designs, making it easier to create complex designs without extensive manual digitizing. Pattern editing: You can edit existing pattern fills, creating unique and personalized patterns for your embroidery projects. Design mirroring: SewArt enables you to mirror designs horizontally or vertically, allowing you to create symmetrical or repeating patterns. Versatility for Diverse Embroidery Projects SewArt caters to a wide range of embroidery projects, including: Personalized clothing: Create custom designs for t-shirts, caps, jackets, and other garments. Home décor: Enhance your home décor with embroidered pillows, curtains, tablecloths, and other embellishments. Gifts and souvenirs: Create personalized gifts and souvenirs, such as engraved mugs, embroidered keychains, or personalized bags. Affordable and Versatile Solution for Embroidery Enthusiasts SewArt's competitive pricing makes it an accessible and affordable solution for embroidery enthusiasts of all levels. Its versatile features and user-friendly interface make it a valuable tool for both personal and professional embroidery projects. Whether you're a beginner starting your embroidery journey or an experienced designer seeking a powerful digitizing tool, SewArt offers a comprehensive solution for creating high-quality embroidery designs. Its ease of use, versatile features, and compatibility with a wide range of embroidery machines make it a versatile choice for a variety of projects. So, embark on your embroidery journey with SewArt and unleash your creativity! -

My Editor

My Editor is a free embroidery software that allows you to create and edit embroidery designs in a variety of file formats. It is compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems and can be used with most embroidery machines. My Editor offers a variety of features, such as auto-digitizing, manual digitizing, and image conversion. It also includes a variety of stitch types, such as fill stitching, satin stitching, and applique.

My Editor: A Free and User-Friendly Embroidery Software for Creative Expression

In the realm of embroidery, My Editor stands out as a user-friendly and free embroidery software that empowers individuals to create and customize embroidery designs without the need for extensive technical knowledge or expensive software licenses. Ease of Use and Intuitive Interface My Editor's intuitive interface makes it an approachable tool for both beginners and experienced embroiderers. The software's clear navigation and user-friendly design ensure that you can seamlessly import, edit, and create embroidery designs without getting overwhelmed by complex menus or technical jargon. Import and Edit Embroidery Designs My Editor allows you to import a wide range of graphic file formats, including .DST, .JEF, .EXP, .PCS, .HUS, .VIP, .SE, and .PEC, giving you the freedom to incorporate existing designs or create your own from scratch. Edit Embroidery Designs Seamlessly With My Editor's robust editing tools, you can refine and personalize your embroidery designs with ease. You can adjust stitch parameters, modify design elements, and add or remove stitches to achieve your desired aesthetic. Customize Stitch Styles My Editor offers a variety of stitch styles, including satin, outline, fill, and backstitch variations. You can customize these stitches to create intricate designs with different textures and effects, adding depth and dimension to your embroidery projects. Export Designs to Your Embroidery Machine After creating your masterpiece, you can seamlessly export your edited embroidery designs to your embroidery machine in a variety of supported formats. This compatibility ensures that your designs are compatible with various embroidery machines and needle types. Free and Easy to Access My Editor's free availability makes it an accessible option for embroidery enthusiasts of all levels, regardless of their budget or technical expertise. The software's simple download and installation process allow you to start creating your embroidery designs right away.

Embroidermodder

Embroidermodder is a free embroidery software that allows you to create and edit embroidery designs in a variety of file formats. It is compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems and can be used with most embroidery machines. Embroidermodder offers a variety of features, such as auto-digitizing, manual digitizing, and image conversion. It also includes a variety of stitch types, such as fill stitching, satin stitching, and applique.

Embroidermodder: A Free and Powerful Tool for Embroidery Design Manipulation

In the realm of embroidery, Embroidermodder stands as a free and open-source software solution that empowers users to modify and manipulate existing embroidery designs without the need for expensive licensing fees or proprietary formats. Powerful Editing and Manipulation Tools Embroidermodder equips users with a comprehensive suite of tools for editing and manipulating embroidery designs. These tools enable you to: Import embroidery designs in various formats, including DST, JEF, EXP, PCS, HUS, VIP, SE, and PEC. Edit stitch patterns, adjust stitch parameters, and modify design elements to achieve your desired aesthetic. Convert embroidery designs between different formats to ensure compatibility with various embroidery machines. Create custom embroidery fonts for personalized text elements. Manipulate existing embroidery designs to create unique and personalized creations. Open-Source Accessibility and Flexibility Embroidermodder's open-source nature promotes flexibility and accessibility. As a free and open-source software, Embroidermodder empowers users to: Access the source code and contribute to the development of the software. Share and collaborate on project files with other users. Use the software for commercial purposes without any restrictions. A Valuable Tool for Embroidery Enthusiasts Embroidermodder serves as a valuable tool for both beginners and experienced embroidery enthusiasts seeking to enhance their designs or create unique creations. Its free availability and open-source nature make it an accessible and versatile choice for anyone passionate about embroidery. -

SewWhat-Pro

SewWhat-Pro is a free embroidery software that allows you to view, edit, and convert embroidery files in a variety of formats. It is compatible with both Windows and Mac operating systems and can be used with most embroidery machines. SewWhat-Pro offers a variety of features, such as resizing, colorizing, and printing. It also includes a variety of stitch types, such as fill stitching, satin stitching, and applique.

SewWhatPro: Unleashing Your Embroidery Design Creation Potential

In the realm of embroidery, SewWhatPro stands as a powerful software solution for creating and editing embroidery designs. It empowers users of all skill levels to bring their creativity to life through intricate and personalized embroidery projects. Read the full article

#embroidery machine #embroidery software #embroidery tips

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jerry618 · 2 years ago

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TFT vs AMOLED Display: Differences and Which is Better

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www.xygledscreen.com

What is TFT Display

TFT is an abbreviation for Thin Film Transistor, a flat panel display used to improve the operation and utility of LCD screens. In order to portray an appearance to the audience, a liquid crystal display (LCD) utilizes a crystalline-filled fluid to modify rear lighting polarized origin through the use of an electromagnetic force among two relatively thin metal wires such as indium oxide (ITO). However, color TFT displays are associated with this method, which can be employed in both divided and pixelated display systems.

With motion pictures displayed on an LCD, the intrinsic sluggish rate of increase between liquid phases over a significant number of pixel components can be an issue due to capacitance impacts, which can create a blurring of the visuals. Placing a high-velocity LCD control device inside the formation of a thin-film transistor immediately next to the cell component just on a glass screen, the issue of LCD picture speed may be substantially improved, and image blur can be eliminated for all useful purposes entirely.

What is AMOLED Display

Organic light-emitting diodes (AMOLEDs) are a type of flat light-emitting advanced technologies that are created by interspersing a succession of organic thin sheets over two conducting conductors. An electrical charge causes a brilliant light to be produced when the current flows. AMOLED displays are light-emitting screens that do not require a backlight, making them thinner and more energy-efficient than liquid crystal displays (LCDs) (which will need a white backlight).

AMOLED displays are not only thin and fuel-intensive, but they also deliver the highest image quality available, so they can be made translucent, elastic, bendable, or even rollable and stretchy in the future, allowing for a variety of applications. AMOLEDs are a revolutionary technology in terms of display devices! It is possible to create an AMOLED by sandwiching a sequence of thin films across phase conductors. Electric charge causes a brilliant light to be emitted when the current flows through the coil.

Differences Between TFT and AMOLED Display

1. TFT

Pros

The color display is fantastic. Color intensity, sharpness, and luminance settings that are second to none and can be customized to meet the needs of any application.

Half-Life has been expanded. TFT displays have a far longer half-life than its LED equivalents, and they are available in a number of sizes, which might have an effect on the device's half-life based on the phone's usage as well as other variables. Touch panels for TFT screens can be either resistant or capacitance in nature.

As it is more affordable than capacitive, resistive is typically the preferred option. However, capacitive technology is compatible with a wide range of contemporary smartphones and digital gadgets.

Cons

The pricing is higher than that of other displays available in the market.

Viewing angles that are out of proportion

Due to the apparent glass panels, there is limited functionality. For instance, there are ineffective for outdoor use because the glass can display glares from its natural lighting)

They rely on backlight to give illumination rather than generating their own light. Hence they require constructed light-creating diodes (LEDs) in their backlit display framework to ensure enough brightness.

2. AMOLED

Pros

An AMOLED's organic plastic layers are lighter, thinner, and much more bendable than LED or LCD crystal layers.

Backlighting is unnecessary for AMOLEDs. LCDs produce images by selectively blocking parts of the illumination, whereas AMOLEDs produce light. AMOLEDs utilize less energy than LCDs since they don't need backlighting. This is critical for battery-powered devices such as phones.

While AMOLED light-emitting sheets are lightweight, the substrate can also be elastic rather than stiff. AMOLED films are not limited to glass-like LEDs and LCDs.

AMOLEDs offer 170-degree ranges of vision. LCDs operate by obscuring the light. Hence they have intrinsic viewing obstacles. In addition, AMOLEDs have a substantially wider viewing spectrum.

AMOLEDs outperform LEDs. Since AMOLED organic coatings are less than LED inorganic crystal levels, AMOLED conducting and particle emitters layers can just be multi-layered. Also, LEDs and LCDs need glass backing, which absorbs light. AMOLEDs don't need it.

AMOLEDs seem to be simpler to implement and larger. AMOLEDs are constructed of polymers and may be produced into big sheets. It takes a lot of extra liquid crystals to build and set down.

Cons

While red and green AMOLED sheets have a greater lifespan (46,000 to 230,000 hours), azure compounds have significantly shorter longevity (up to roughly 14,000 hours).

Manufacturing methods are currently cost-prohibitive.

AMOLEDs are susceptible to damage by water.

Which to Choose Under Different Situations: TFT vs AMOLED Display

Light Emission

Due to the fact that AMOLED displays inherently emit illumination, they do not need a backlight when used on a monitor screen. Conversely, LCDs require backlights since the liquid crystals themselves are incapable of producing light under their own. Direct light emission from AMOLED displays also allows for the developing of lightweight display devices than others using TFT LCDs.

Better Brightness

LCD displays have a higher brightness than AMOLED panels. This is owing to the LCD's usage of led backlight, which may provide a brilliant illumination of the entire display. Despite the fact that AMOLEDs produce high levels of brilliance from their illumination, they will never be able to match the intensity of LCD lighting.

Energy Consumption

LCD screens use less power than AMOLED displays, which provides a slight advantage. The amount of energy consumed by AMOLED displays is dependent on the intensity of the screen. Lowered luminance results in lower energy usage, however, it might not be the best solution because the contrast would suffer as a result of the decreased brightness. In some situations, such as when to use an AMOLED device in direct sunlight, it is not an optimal situation.

However, the backlit keys of TFT displays account for the majority of their power usage. TFT screens' efficiency is considerably improved when the backlight is set to a lesser brightness level than the default setting. For example, replacing the light of an LCD TV with just an Led flash will have no effect on the image quality, but will result in lower power usage than replacing the light of an AMOLED TV.

Conclusion: TFT vs AMOLED Display

With the exception of phones, numerous other technologies make use of displays to allow customers to engage in direct communication with them. To determine whether or not TFT LCD will be able to withstand the development of AMOLED innovation, we should first review the benefits of LCD technology. The backlighting quality ensures that whites are strong and brightness is superb but will deplete a battery much more quickly than just an AMOLED display. Furthermore, the cost of LCD screens is a considerable consideration. In addition to being less expensive and more easily accessible, they are produced in standard industry sizes, allowing them to be purchased for innovative products with relative ease.

#www.xygledscreen.com #xygled #ledscreen #led display #xinyiguang

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graphcoalportrait · 2 years ago

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Personalized Gifts and Beyond: The Magic of Custom Portrait Painting

In a world of mass-produced items, personalized gifts hold a unique charm. They convey thoughtfulness, sentimental value, and a personal touch that transcends the ordinary. Among the many ways to create personalized gifts, custom portrait painting stands out as a timeless and treasured option. In this blog, we'll explore the enchanting world of custom portrait painting, delving into its history, significance, and how it brings cherished memories to life.

A Brief History of Portrait Painting

Portrait painting has a rich history dating back centuries. Traditionally, portraits were reserved for royalty and the elite, serving as a way to immortalize their likeness. However, as art became more accessible, portrait painting expanded to include everyday people. Artists captured not only the physical appearance of their subjects but also their personalities and life stories.

The Significance of Custom Portrait Painting

Custom portrait painting holds a special place in the world of personalized gifts for several reasons:

Capturing Memories: A custom portrait allows you to freeze a moment in time. Whether it's a family portrait, a couple's first dance, or a beloved pet, it immortalizes the emotions and memories associated with that moment.

Expressing Love and Appreciation: Giving someone a custom portrait is a heartfelt way to show your love and appreciation. It demonstrates that you've put thought and effort into creating a unique and meaningful gift.

Preserving Legacy: Custom portraits become family heirlooms. They tell the story of generations, preserving the faces and stories of loved ones for future generations to cherish.

Decorative Art: Beyond sentimental value, custom portraits are beautiful pieces of art. They can enhance the aesthetic of any space, adding a personal touch to home decor.

The Process of Creating a Custom Portrait

1)Creating a custom portrait painting involves collaboration between the artist and the client. Here's a simplified overview of the process:

2)Select an Artist: Begin by choosing an artist whose style aligns with your vision for the portrait.

3)Consultation: Have a consultation with the artist to discuss your ideas, preferences, and the size of the portrait.

4)Reference Photos: Provide high-quality reference photos that capture the subject's likeness and any specific details you want to include.

5)Artistic Interpretation: The artist will interpret the photos and bring them to life on canvas or paper, often adding their artistic flair.

6)Feedback and Revisions: You'll have the opportunity to review the work in progress and request revisions if needed.

7)Finalizing the Portrait: Once you're satisfied with the portrait, the artist will complete it, ensuring it meets your expectations.

The Magic of Personalized Gifts

Custom portrait painting is more than just a personalized gift; it's a testament to the power of art to connect us to our emotions, memories, and loved ones. Whether it's a wedding anniversary, a family reunion, or a tribute to a beloved pet, a custom portrait painting tells a unique story that words alone cannot convey.

Conclusion In a world filled with fleeting digital images, custom portrait painting stands as a timeless and enduring form of personalized gifting. It's a magical way to celebrate life's special moments, preserve cherished memories, and express love and appreciation. So, consider the gift of a custom portrait for your next special occasion, and let its beauty and sentimentality create lasting memories for you and your loved ones.

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gay-snom · 4 years ago

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contextualizing lwj’s coming to terms with his feelings subplot!

i wanna talk about the role of confucianism in this subplot because i think it’s something some western fans might not pick up on. basically, the sociopolitical climate of confucianism in his character arc, and a little bit about his interaction with the public image theme.

disclaimer: i’m not chinese but i do have a double minor in chinese and asian studies and have written a few papers on confucianism.

we’re gonna be talking about the novel bc i feel its a little more in-depth and nuanced than lwj’s “what is black, what is white” monologue in cql. namely the tension and misunderstanding in wwx’s first life and how lwj got his scars. i feel like it’s pretty well accepted that wwx made lwj reconsider his world view, so i’m just gonna expand on it. also i want to point out it's pretty unspoken in most of the text, but lwj is also affected by/used to explore the public image themes, as his image the is ideal confucian scholar.

confucianism is centered around the ideas of how to behave “good” in sociopolitical contexts. basically it boils down to a belief system on how society should be run. if everyone follows confucian beliefs, you will have an ideal society. the main text is the Analects, which you can read here. it’s been around for a few thousand years (like around 200 BCE ish), had a huge revival in the tang dynasty (618-907 CE). it was put on imperial exams, the emperor’s cabinet had confucian scholars, etc. this is just to say confucian values are important to historic society, especially upper-class scholars, which seems to be a role cultivators commonly fill in xianxia. here are some basic tenants:

being a gentleman/scholar/superior man (君子 jūn zǐ) : partly being learned in the arts, literature, music, poetry, etc., mostly behaving righteously and dutifully.

filial piety: usually described as obedience. it's not simply obeying everything elders tell you, it includes doing it with reverence and thankfulness for their sacrifices for you.

leading by example: if leaders/the government is righteous, the people will follow. lwj has his flock of juniors that are all strong cultivators and the lan sect is just generally known for being moral and good.

rites/rituals: a focus on politeness and holding proper ceremonies, sacrifices, and funerals

speech: there’s some great meta about the register he speaks in here, i just want to touch on think carefully before you speak, only speak sincerely, etc.

tldr; lwj is THE perfect gentleman (even his title contains the character suffix 君 -jūn, like lxc. which, while this character is not uncommon for cultivator titles, it wasn’t chosen carelessly either. also not to be confused with 尊 -zūn). seriously, look at almost all of book 10 and you'll see don't do/consume in excess, don't talk during meals, sit only when your mat is straight, etc.

okay, so Why is understanding his feelings for wwx so troublesome?

1.2 "They are few who, being filial and fraternal, are fond of offending against their superiors. There have been none, who, not liking to offend against their superiors, have been fond of stirring up confusion... Filial piety and fraternal submission! - are they not the root of all benevolent actions?"

in other words, people who are filial will never create political tension. so like, morally, wwx should be considered horrible person! he’s not only snubbed the jiang sect. he was a head disciple who undoubtedly had younger students looking up to him. and then he goes and stirs up some huge political issues! he is now a bad role model for the people below him and disrespected the people above him. lwj has an entire image to uphold, he has poured his entire life into following these rules and beliefs, and then wwx comes along. would continuing to be in wwx's life taint lwj? there are some contradicting teachings in regards to interacting with wwx:

15.4: "Do not take counsel with those who follow a different Way"

15.28: "When the multitude hates a person, you must examine them and judge for yourself. The same holds true for someone whom the multitude love."

15.36 "When it comes to being Good, defer to no one, not even your teacher."

this is part of the reason lwj had so much trouble accepting his feelings. he didn’t know how to handle this situation, making him appear distant during/directly after sunshot. if he judges wwx's intentions to be pure, it's then not wrong to be friendly with him. but wwx still is morally wrong by society's standards. now, lwj has to not only figure out his feelings, but also reconcile this with how he still thinks wwx is Not a bad person, despite everything. what if he does get "tainted" by wwx? will it hurt the reputation of his sect? that would be un-filial, right? he spent his whole life memorizing rules that are probably extremely similar to sections in the Analects, and now these mixed messages (coupled with the relatable gay panic) are overwhelming.

onto the next! there’s something unspoken in the scene where wwx discovers why lwj has the whip scars. as other posts have mentioned, lwj taking wwx back to the burial mounds and nursing him is high treason. however, this action is also extremely un-filial. also his entire image is built around being a perfect gentleman, if this were to get out to the public he would lose absolutely everything. he would be just as irreparable as wwx.

“I was worried if those from another sect found you first, WangJi would be considered your accomplice. The best scenario was his name being forever tainted, and the worst was his life being taken away right then. Thus, along with Uncle, we chose thirty three seniors who had always thought highly of WangJi... ”

there’s no way lwj didn’t know what would happen if he did this. obviously as lxc says, if this got out, he would lose basically his entire face. and even though lxc didn’t mention this, it would definitely lose a lot of face for the lan sect as well since lwj is so prominent. the decision about what elders to bring is also notable.

“...As if he knew all along he would be discovered by us, he said that there was nothing to explain, that this was it. Growing up, he had never talked back to Uncle, not even once. But for you, not only did WangJi talk back to him, he even met with his sword the cultivators from the Gusu Lan sect...”

so yeah, he obviously knew they would come for him and what the consequences would be. and he still talked back! that’s already not a good look for the lan sect. but attacking them? totally unforgivable! lwj gives up how he was raised and the importance of filial piety, what he has held on to until this major plot event. since it's basically the biggest "fuck you" to his uncle and his clan, this was not a decision he made lightly. lwj shows them he cares more about wwx and His Own ideas of right and wrong than the sect’s or society’s.

Wei WuXian dug his hands into his hair, “...I-I didn’t know... I really...”

when was the last time wwx was at a loss for words? wwx spends a few paragraphs after this lamenting how he hurt lwj, but he's not unaware of the gravity of what lwj did. it's an underlying assumption from being raised in the culture. i would argue his first instinct is "oh god he gave up what for me?" since those lamenting paragraphs are after lxc finishes speaking.

"But he said... that he could not say with certainty whether what you did was right or wrong..."

this is something thrown around a lot in the Analects, that not even confucius can say for sure what is right or wrong. what better way to show lwj is still a perfect confucian than have him paraphrase confucius himself?

“...WangJi was a model for the disciples when he was young, and a prominent cultivator when he grew up. In his whole life he had been honest and righteous and immaculate--you were the only mistake he made!”

here’s the confirmation that the world and even his family thinks of him as a perfect gentleman, the top tier of society, and it was all thrown away for wwx. this is just so heavy. the mistake thing? thats not only because lwj is fraternizing with an enemy. lxc and the rest of the sect who knew are terrified this will forever corrupt lwj personally, not just publicly. lwj was so devoted to believing this was the right thing to do he offered up everything he had. the gravity of this decision is insane. it’s very obvious that he loves wwx, it’s just that he struggles a lot internally to accept everything that is happening.

as for helping wwx leave after the massacre, is this gentleman-ly of lwj? was it actually in-line with his image? is it more honorable to save someone who is dying, at the cost of your own health, than to look away? isn't looking away a form of resentment? i wasn't able to find a specific passage about bystander-ness, but personally i think it qualifies as "bad intentions." there is also this passage for what it's worth, originally it was about government suppression:

12.19: "...What do you say to killing the unprincipled for the good of the principled?" Confucius replied, "...why should you use killing at all?..."

lwj is always more actions than words, and he was not fucking around. his core beliefs really haven't changed, and remain very strong throughout his life. he is still righteous enough to accept his punishment, graceful enough to search for wwx's body since there was no one else to do the funeral rites (10.22/10.15), caring enough to take in a-yuan, upright enough to still spend his years going where the chaos is.

just with this one action, the audience knows he has come to terms with realizing that authority isn't always just, and neither is the public opinion/opinion of other gentlemen. he has reconciled. this is him standing for what he believes is right. this is his devotion. this is his own choice. just. poetic cinema...

anyway that's it for my first meta post! i would love to hear your thoughts, feelings, opinions, discussions, other meta ideas, whatever! thank u for reading! <3

#its My post and i get to pick the subplot #i have...brainworms #wwx and lwj are foils in the public image theme change my mind #mdzs #mdzs meta #lan wangji #mo dao zu shi #stfu #meta

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chezzzie · 4 years ago

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Why Contemporary Women Artists Are Obsessed with the Grotesque

If artists are generally boundary-crossers, a younger generation of (mostly women) artists is going for full penetration—making artworks that speak to something deep in the body, producing responses that range from carnal attraction to disgust.Among the most potently grotesque examples are Tala Madani’s nightmarish babies and dystopian fantasies of voyeurism and violence, and Jala Wahid’s visceral, sculptural allusions to cuts of meat and dismembered organs and body parts. Or take Marianna Simnett’s unsettling, darkly comic videos that bring to life imagined narratives of bodily invasions—including a gruesome nasal operation and a fable about varicose veins and cockroaches-cum-cyborgs. Then there’s Maisie Cousins’s glossy, close-up images of a wet soup of food, decaying plants, and bodies, which recall the more appalling corners of Cindy Sherman’s imagination. In painting and drawing, too, the grotesque is rampant, with elastic, deformed, or monstrous bodies populating works by Christina Quarles, Ebecho Muslimova, Jana Euler, and Dana Schutz.

In recent exhibitions of work by older and historical artists, as well, we’ve seen the walls erupt in freakish, fleshy forms that have threatened the contained space of a room, as in Dorothea Tanning’s Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot, on view in her retrospective at the Museo Reina Sofia and traveling to the Tate Modern early this year. The ceilings of art spaces have dangled with multi-limbed, Medusa-like monsters and cyborgs (like the sci-fi-inflected psychic landscape of Lee Bul, who had a retrospective at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2018).

With much of these artists’ works, the feeling of deep dread is often a blade’s edge away from erotic desire. As the narrator of Simnett’s film The Needle and the Larynx (2016) says, as she fantasizes about having her vocal chords surgically altered: “So sharp were his knives, so appealing…this was an irrevocable invitation.” This expression of temptation suggests a calling to make art—to create—as much as it does an inclination toward self-regeneration and other forms of transgression. The possibility of metamorphosing one’s flesh and image—of permeating thresholds—is both intoxicating and anxiety-inducing.

The grotesque is inherently associated with the feminine, long having shaped depictions of the female body—prostitutes, femmes fatales, and sorceresses.

The grotesque, as art historian Frances S. Connelly writes in her book The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture (2012), is “a boundary creature” that “roams the borderland of all that is familiar and conventional.” It is desirous of transformation—an “open mouth that invites our descent into other worlds,” like the underground rooms of Nero’s Golden Palace, excavated in the 15th century, which turned up walls decorated with hybrid figures sprouting bits of plants and architecture, and birthed the term “grottoesche.” (Today, our general understanding of the “grotesque” has been boiled down to mean simply “comically or repulsively ugly or distorted,” but art historians and theorists read more complexity into the term.) It is, in many ways, inseparable from the body, which is the most fundamental of boundaries. “What is most regulated in any culture is the body, particularly women’s bodies,” Connelly said during a recent conversation.

The grotesque, she writes, is inherently associated with the feminine—bodied, earthy, changeful. That thinking has long shaped depictions of the female body, including archetypes of sexual or environmental threat, like prostitutes, femmes fatales, and sorceresses. Even centuries before the term emerged, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle “advanced the influential argument that a woman’s body is monstrous by nature, a deviation from that of the normative male,” she writes.The term is fertile, opening up a womb-like space for new ideas and ethical conundrums to accumulate—a conduit through which cultures can play with taboos and shift the parameters of mores and conventions. It is perhaps no wonder, then, that some of the artists touching the grotesque assume a childlike, fairytale language. A fable tells us what is right and wrong, Simnett pointed out when we met. It is also “a game that you can write the rules for,” she said, one through which you can distort or expand reality. The landscape of morality tales and childhood lessons is ripe territory for boundary-pushing perversions to take root.

Very dark fairytales

Children play a central role in several of Simnett’s films, whose absurdist, grotesque narratives are preoccupied with infection, augmentation, and altered states. In her opus Blood In My Milk (2018), the girl protagonist flirts with the outside world, even as adults warn of the risks that this external environment poses.In scenes that take place within an echoey pink space suggesting the inside of an organ, children receive a lesson about the prognosis and treatment of mastitis in cow udders, interspersed with shots of oozing teats being squeezed and dissected. While an officious farm hand dispenses information about how to keep one’s milk clean and pathogen-free, the children engage in playground dares and brinkmanship that include fantasizing about dismantling a girl “into a million bits so she can never be rebuilt.” The children lust after blood in their milk.

Tala Madani is another artist who, in a different way, explodes any veneer of female containment or childhood innocence, making infants and girls agents of the grotesque. In her painting Sunrise (2018), a baby wields a sharp knife at a naked woman’s groin. An infant’s first act, the painting reminded me, is one of violence.In other compositions populated by menacing babies on all fours, withering adults are left in the dust. Shafts (2017) depicts a group of monstrously overgrown tots crawling off into a void-like cyberspace, with beams of light projecting out of their assholes. An aged man in the foreground holds up a flaccid string of feces like a banner of mortality—the next generation might have evolved into light-shitting cyborgs, but we are still blood, matter, and excrement.

The children in Madani’s works also exercise sexual agency. In her animation Sex Ed by God (2017), a young girl with legs splayed is being studied by an older man, a boy, and God (the narrator of this lesson). She reaches out of the frame and grabs her male onlookers, shrinking them down to size and squeezing them into her vagina, along with the rest of the scene. The adolescent counterpart to a baby who explores the world with its mouth, this teenager-protagonist processes the world and corrects its distorted power balances through her sex. (Madani has a corollary of a kind in the work of Ebecho Muslimova, whose ink drawings feature a female alter-ego who fills and consumes the world with her vast and doughy naked body, luxuriantly covering and penetrating objects—a piano, patio furniture—with uncontrollable flesh and organ.)Madani’s universe is one whose grotesqueries seem shaped, at least to some degree, by the thrills and anxieties of sexuality, motherhood, mortality, and technological change. But it is also one in which children subvert the hierarchy between parent and progeny. The grotesque becomes a means to dissolve power structures.

Both familiar and alien

The contemporary grotesque is interested in underlining the way that bodies that are different from the (white, male) norm, or that, in deviating from impossible standards, are treated as aberrant or monstrous. Artists who touch the grotesque subvert and claim power in part by owning flesh and blood.When I visited Jala Wahid’s studio recently, one sculpture she showed me comprised a cast of the artist’s buttocks resting on a smooth liquid-like surface that is based on the shape of a natural oil well. The exposed position of Wahid’s dismembered rear is both “a provocation and a vulnerability at the same time,” she told me, its position on an oil slick alluding to the politics of Kurdistan, where her parents are from. In her work, she is often thinking about the contested Kurdish body, which is continually “under threat” but also resilient—a body that is both powerful and yet subject to power and control. Another in-progress sculpture in the studio, a thick wedge of slick red jesmonite, will eventually approximate the form of a bloody ox liver that Wahid encountered in a meat market in Kurdistan. (It brings to mind the work of Paul Thek, whom she cites as an influence.)

The contemporary grotesque is interested in how bodies that are different from the white, male norm are treated as aberrant or monstrous.

Wahid is drawn to the great diversity of textures and colors that exist in bodies (in flesh, organs, offal), as well as the relationship between butcher and animal. She wants, in some way, to approach her role as a sculptor like a meat handler—with both violence and reverence—and to create forms that are live and confrontational. To frame her work solely in terms of power dynamics is to simplify it, however. She is interested in bodies in states of transformation, in their formal nuances and their vast capacity for expression. (She showed me a picture of an Assyrian frieze at the British Museum, which features the form of a hunted lion, its upper body upright and fierce, its hind legs shot through and flaccid—a single body in which “you have something really strong but at the same time dead and limp,” she explained.) But she does want her sculptures to have autonomy and wield a certain affective power in the room.

When bodies spill out of their boundaries, or when parts are severed from the whole, they become something unsettlingly other. That forces viewers to renegotiate the borderlands between inside and outside, between themselves and the source of their disquiet. In Wahid’s work, body parts and unidentifiable cuts of meat force viewers into a visceral encounter with objects that are familiar, but also alien. “A human corpse is not in itself abject, but one’s encounter with it certainly is,” Connelly writes, describing an idea within the philosopher Julia Kristeva’s seminal 1982 essay on the abject in art. This recalibration of one’s relationship to the object engages the body as it tries to gauge whether the foreign article is a source of threat or attraction—perhaps both.In the work of sculptor Doreen Garner, we see this at play to profoundly disturbing effect. In some cases hung from meat hooks, her hulks of fleshy silicone are neither human nor meat—too dismembered and deformed to be human, too suggestive of the whole to be flesh alone. Upon inspection, the horrifying human steaks, pierced with pins, reveal the fingers of a hand, or a stray breast. Garner’s objects are intended to touch a nerve deep in the viewer’s own body—specifically, to register the trauma visited on the bodies of enslaved black women by members of the American medical industry. This is the grotesque as a means to produce shock and empathy—to expose the transformation of the body into something monstrous as a consequence of the abuse of power.

Garner’s work occasionally recalls the work of a historical pioneer of the grotesque in art—Robert Gober—in particular, works like the artist’s Untitled (1990), a slumped chest cast in wax that sprouts a female breast on one side, a hairy male pectoral on the other. This crumpled human fragment expresses the vulnerability of the human body, and insists on its gender hybridity, while also speaking to another abuse of power that simmers beneath his work—that of the U.S. government’s failure to respond to the AIDS crisis.

A fascination with monstrous bodies

The grotesque, of course, is not owned by women artists. It’s interesting, as well, to note how queer artists, in addition to Gober, have played in this terrain. In his latest show, at Ashes/Ashes, Ryan McNamara presented a sculptural showcase that included I Can’t Even Think Straight (2018), a sad, cartoonish figure practically melting off the wall. Faces dissolve into pools of liquid fish scales (Whispers, 2018); a series of gungey monsters with skin dripping from their brains joyfully snap selfies. The ghoulish group was in part conceived as a celebration of the queer nightclub in Phoenix, Arizona, where McNamara danced with other outcasts and misfits in his youth.But women, too, are deploying monstrous bodies in the world to empower the marginalized, or to satirize cultural norms and behaviors around age and gender. In two of artist Jana Euler’s latest paintings, she seems to offer biting commentary on our culture’s existential angst and exaltation of youth. Global warnings (people who are over 100 years old) (2018) is a mosaic of portraits of the elderly, each with a fantastically warped face. They are melted, pinched, and sunken, with cyclops eyes glaring from foreheads, and mouths swiveled 180 degrees.

In race against yourself (2018), a naked man rides an equine incarnation of himself, hands and feet turned into muscular hooves. This ghastly centaur and its rider are set against a fleshy backdrop composed of a snaking, human-faced colon, squeezed into the painting’s borders. The work speaks to something deeply perverse in human psychology—a propensity to hurtle through our lives at break-neck speed until our bodies crumple and we hit the grave. We can’t escape our own proclivities, much less our flesh and blood.Indeed, a profound awareness of human mortality is rarely far from the surface when it comes to the grotesque. When I asked Connelly about the common preoccupation with degrading flesh and food, she had this to say: “Life is constant change; we’re eating the world, the world eats us. We’re all mortal. We’re all human. We’re all meat. That’s seen as really traumatic.”

Other artists have created distorted, dismembered, and multi-limbed bodies to more optimistic effect. Christina Quarles paints bending tangles of limbs, bodies that insist on setting their own parameters and determining their own identities. Cindy Sherman continues to irreverently expand the possibilities of the grotesque, harnessing digital technologies to create fabulously idiosyncratic faces via her Instagram feed—ones that contort her visage in every direction except towards any convention of beauty; her fictional selfies are gloriously aging, sun-damaged, plastered in makeup, with features too big, too small, too gender-ambiguous.

Sherman expands the aesthetics of the (female, queer) body. In Maisie Cousins’s saturated close-ups of decaying messes of flesh, entrails, petals, prawns, and flies, too, something generative emerges. Cousins’s celebratory collisions of wet body parts, food remnants, and plants give the abject a facelift. Images of mild disgust find a place within the aesthetic of slick fashion magazine advertising. As such, they variously recall Sherman’s glossy, stomach-turning mixtures of waste, Marilyn Minter’s photorealistic renderings of gaudily made-up bodies and imperfections, and Gina Beaver’s paintings of bodies and fast food. (The latter artist will open an exhibition at MoMA PS1 in March.) Cousins’s photographs are full of innuendo, ripe, inviting us to find beauty in things spilling outside of their borders—to see our own bodies in the bounty of organic matter that the world has to offer.

It makes sense that among a generation increasingly comfortable with open, fluid approaches to identity—and fluent in the great toxic and transformational soup of the internet—artists value aesthetics rooted in states of change and hybridity. “I feel that is a constant, to be in a permanent state of transition,” Simnett told me. “In a sense, everyone is undergoing a mutation. It’s where I feel most natural. You get to meet a million more people, species, ideas. It’s like tendrils constantly reaching out, rather than staying put.” This hunger to explore and break down the boundaries of human experience, however anxious or unsettling—to deconstruct and reinvent the body—is generating some of the most vital and complex art being made today.

Tess Thackara

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jerkbitchidjitassbutt · 4 years ago

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It Was You (Part Five)

A/N: Jensen and Y/n are childhood best friends. When his agent informs him that his image could use some improvement for a role, will she help him? Or will her feelings get in the way?

Catch up here!

A holiday (Christmas centric) Jensen x Female!Reader Best Friends to Lovers series for @spnchristmasbingo. This chapter and others will fill the square of ‘fake dating’ and this one specifically checks ‘ugly Christmas sweaters’. Un-beta’d, so all mistakes are mine. Header created by me with images from Google. Chapter word count: 3909 (its a longer one, oops)

Series Warnings: cursing, angst-ish at times (if you squint), but mostly all the fluff. Chapter warnings: an original character is sort of mean.

I consider this an AU, as Jensen is single in this fic. This is completely a work of fiction, and I wouldn’t want his reality to be any different, this is purely for entertainment.

Since you arrived late in the afternoon, you and Jensen had little time to rest before the party began. You stowed your things in your respective rooms in Jared’s home across the hall from one another and found the ugly sweaters Gen had chosen for you.

Jensen tried to peak into your room to see yours, but you shot him a look before you closed the door. “Oh c’mon, Y/n! Let me see!”

“Nope! We get to share in each other’s humiliation together!”

You heard him grunt on the other side of the door before he stomped across the hall and shut his door.

Yours was a bright, Christmassy red with white reindeer and an intricate pattern and overall, kind of cute. She also left you a jingle bell bracelet and earrings, so you quickly changed into a pair of jeans, your sweater, and a pair of black ballet flats. Loosening your hair from the tie, you let it fall and fluffed it a bit and applied a small amount of make-up, before finishing the look with some red lipstick and a small amount of gloss to be festive.

When you opened the door, you were met with a very grumpy looking Jensen. He pouted and gestured to himself, causing you to throw your head back in laughter. His sweater had red sleeves and a collar but had black and white patches with various designs all over, including a poinsettia, a string of lights, and a snowman. He was also wearing dark-wash jeans but had put on his black boots beneath that accentuated his slightly bowed legs. You couldn’t help but melt at the sight – he looked absolutely adorable and his pouty expression reminded you of when you were kids, when you wouldn’t share your ice cream with him after he’d eaten all of his own.

Covering your mouth to quiet your giggling, he put his hands on his hips and gave you a bitch face but softened his features when you told him how cute he looked.

“C’mon though,” he wined. “You look adorable. Your sweater is at least bearable. I look ridiculous.”

Something made you reach out to him, sliding your arms around his trim waist as he wrapped his around you. His dimples reached his cheeks as he smiled at you, a bit flirtatiously.

“Hey,” you reassured. “I’m sure you’re going to be the hit of the party with that outfit. You look great.”

Jensen sighed a deep breath, content to feel your body in his arms, “As long as you think so, sweetheart, I’m happy.”

“I always do.”

You felt that urge again as he glanced at your lips, the fire in your belly hadn’t quelled since that morning. Jensen growled down at you as you bit your lip once more, the noise making your blood rush to all sorts of places. He raised his hand to cup your cheek before tangling it into your hair, his mouth mere inches from yours.

Jared called from out of view at the bottom of the stairs, making your heads snap in the general direction, “Hey, guys! You almost ready? We’ve got your drinks made.”

You could hear some distant chatter, meaning that people had started to arrive. You shared a frustrated smile with Jensen as he pulled his hand from your cheek, grazing it slightly before he let go. You gripped his hand tightly as you led him down the stairs, but he was now pouting for a different reason.

You were met with hugs and smiles as you bounded into the room, Jared and Gen mixing in with the crowd of old friends and new faces. You were introduced to everyone and mingled, straying away from Jensen only slightly. He was chatting with a mutual friend of Jared’s as you socialized with a few of the women from the neighborhood, but each of you kept stealing glances at one another every few moments. Everything had shifted, both suddenly and slowly all at once. Instead of the casual glimpses you’d throw in each other’s direction when you were at a party in the past, which were more of just silent conversations asking if you or he needed saving from the person you were talking to in that moment, the stares tonight were affectionate and heated. It felt like he couldn’t keep his eyes off of you and anytime you were within reach, he made some sort of excuse to have his hands on you. Whether it was casually placing his hand on the small of your back to lead you somewhere or brushing your hair from your shoulder, he was constantly touching you in some way. It was comforting and fraying your nerves all at once.

You made your way into the kitchen to freshen your drink and grab a few of the snacks that Gen had made. She always pulled out all the stops for her parties and tonight was no different. She’d made a gigantic charcuterie board that expanded across their entire kitchen island, full of a variety of meats, cheeses, crackers, sauces, fruits and veggies. You filled your dish and grabbed a napkin and your drink before making your way back out to the living area where everyone was gathered, saying hi to a few people that passed by you.

Setting your drink down beside you, you picked through your plate as you began talking with Gen’s college roommate about the random happenings in Austin when Jensen’s form caught your eye. He was talking to someone who had their back turned to you, but she looked familiar though you couldn’t quite place how until she turned to wave at someone, and you couldn’t help but roll your eyes. It was Melanie. She was one of those people who always showed up to Jared and Gen’s parties and that everyone knew, but no one really cared for. She was very open about the fact that she was trying to up her social status in town and was anxious to settle down with someone who could help her do so. She paid to get into all the right clubs and have all the right things, but the hunger and greed radiated from her. Granted, to each their own and you wouldn’t normally judge, but you knew why she was being so chummy with Jensen. You felt a pang of jealousy that he was being his usual, charming self with her, chuckling when she told him a joke. His eyes scanned the room before they landed on you and his smile lit up his features, but when Melanie placed her hand on his forearm his attention went back to her. She was trim and beautiful on the outside and you couldn’t help but feel a bit protective and bitter that she was trying to sink her claws into Jensen, and so a bit of doubt flowed through your mind that he would want someone like you.

Jensen internally groaned when Melanie started another conversation about her macrobiotic diet as her acrylic nails drummed against her glass, praying that she would take a breath so that he could excuse himself. He let his mind wander to Y/n for a moment, anxious to be done with this party so that he could be alone with her again. He needed to know what she was feeling about them… and couldn’t wait to find out. His attention shot back to Melanie when he heard her shrill giggle and she asked, “So, are you seeing anyone?”

He knew that look. She’d given him that look plenty of times before – she plastered on a coy smile, trying to seem sexy as she batted her eyes up at him.

“Well…” he began, but paused, which Melanie took as an opportunity to shoot her shot.

“If you’re not, we should go out sometime. I know this great little club downtown that—”

Jensen held his hand up to stop her gently, “I’m sorry to if I gave you that impression, Melanie, but I’m spoken for.” He said firmly, and he meant it. She wouldn’t be his type on any given day, but he also knew he didn’t want to see anyone else anymore. At least not until he explored things with Y/n.

Melanie seemed taken aback, and almost offended. She turned her nose up slightly and scoffed before jutting her chin in the direction where Y/n was sitting. “Well, have you told her? She’s going to be a bit disappointed when she finds out.”

Jensen felt anger rise in his chest, his features contorting into a deep scowl, more at the fact that Melanie even had the audacity to mention Y/n, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, come on, Jay.” Don’t call me that, his mind roared. “She’s been clinging to your heals for as long as I’ve known you.” You don’t know me, she does. “You two have been in the news lately and everyone’s always questioned how close the two of you were.” You have no idea. “It’s not like she fits in here, you know.” She said disapprovingly as she glared in your direction, making Jensen’s blood boil.

He cleared his throat loudly, making Melanie jerk to face him in surprise. When she looked at him, he had a fire in his eyes that made her swallow thickly, but he kept his voice calm as he spoke, “Honestly, Melanie? Who I am or am not seeing is frankly none of your business, nor is it anyone else’s. And Y/n?” he motioned to where you were still seated, “No one compares to her. She’s the most beautiful and caring person I’ve ever met. She’d give anyone the shirt off of her back and she deeply cares about other people, not about what they can do for her. You could learn a thing or two from her.” He barked, moving to step away from her. “She’s one of the only true friends I have in this world, and I’ll be damned if I hear her name out of your mouth again.” With that, he left her standing with her mouth agape and waves of emotion rolling off of him.

Jared eyed Jensen heading for his back patio, looking more pissed than he’d ever seen him. He caught Y/n’s worried eyes and gestured that he’d go, following him as he weaved through the crowd. He found Jensen gripping the railing, steam radiating from him as his knuckles turned white.

“Hey, man. You okay? What happened?” Jared called, noting the tension in his shoulders.

Jensen huffed, pointing over his shoulder in the direction of the party, “Melanie.”

“Yeah? What’d she say?”

“Just something about Y/n. It pissed me off.”

Jared crossed his arms, immediately becoming concerned. You were one of his closest friends as well, so he wasn’t about to stand idly by if Melanie was talking about you, “What the hell did she say?” he asked, his own anger growing.

“She was trying to ask me out. When I told her I was seeing someone, she made a smart-ass remark about Y/n, talking about how her and I are always together and that she didn’t fit in.”

“Are you kidding me?” Jared’s voice rose. “She belongs here more than anyone else! Especially Melanie. That bitch wouldn’t know shit about fitting in.”

“I know. She’s insane.”

Jared had already made up his mind to say something to Melanie, but his focus was on his best friend at the moment, “Try not to let it bother you, okay? I know you have your fears about what’s going on with Y/n, but her fitting in isn’t even a question.”

Jensen nodded, “Nah, it’s definitely not… and that’s not even what bothered me the most.”

“I know.” Jared empathized, “We always get defensive about people we love.”

Love. Jensen smiled a bit at the word, and Jared caught it. He clapped him on the shoulder, Jensen returning the sentiment, before Jared his way back inside and immediately seeking out Melanie. When he couldn’t find her, he assumed she’d left and he was more than happy to see her go. She wouldn’t be on the guest list of anything else he had a hand in any time soon.

Y/n ventured outside in search of Jensen, abandoning her glass in the kitchen. He was leaning his elbows against the railing with his shoulders slumped. He didn’t look as upset as he had before Jared came out, but she could tell he was still angry about something.

“Jay? You okay?”

He turned towards her, his green eyes shimmering in the dim light casting from inside. He actually looked sad, more so than angry. “Hey sweetheart, I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing, really. Melanie’s just an ass.”

“Well, yeah… I could’ve told you that.” You laughed, making him smile a bit.

He pulled you to him, circling his arms around your shoulders as you rested your head on his chest. The gesture was welcome, but it worried you all the same. You ran your hands on his back, feeling him take a sigh of release and letting the tension melt from him. He rested his cheek on your head, inhaling that floral scent once again.

After a moment, you eyed him from your place under his arm, “You sure you’re alright? Is there anything I can do to help?” you asked.

Jensen smiled to himself again. That was one of the things he loved about you. It was a humble question, but it was very meaningful to him. You always tried to care for him in the simplest ways, even if it was just being there, and no one could comfort him the way you could.

“I’m fine, Y/n/n.”

You pursed your lips, but didn’t press, “Okay. Do you want to stay out here a bit longer? Or go back into the party?”

“We can head back in.” he said, pressing a kiss to your hairline. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

“Of course, honey. I’m always here if you need me, okay?”

“I know.”

He already knew it, but he’d never get tired of hearing it. He walked back into the party with his hand securely bound around your waist, not caring about the wandering eyes and looks. That was the point of the original arrangement anyway, right? To make people talk? These were people, and they were talking. Now, though, the arrangement didn’t matter. He was holding you because he wanted to, and he wanted everyone to know just who he was here with.

He steered you towards the kitchen and poured himself a whiskey, taking a long sip as you accepted a glass of champagne from someone that was passing them around to all the attendants.

Jared and Gen were standing together in their large living room as they called everyone’s attention, “Everyone!” Jared’s voice boomed over the noise and the soft carols playing in the background. He raised his glass of champagne in a toast, “We just wanted to thank you all for coming out tonight. We think of you all as family and couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate the holidays than with everyone here. Our lives are blessed, so thank you. Merry Christmas everyone, and happy holidays!” Gen acknowledged to everyone in the room as she smiled brightly, tucked beneath Jared’s arm.

You and Jensen were huddled beneath the doorframe that entered their kitchen, your back lightly pressed into his chest as you both sipped from your glasses.

“Uh oh!” A loud voice sounded behind you, causing a few people to look your way. “Looks like someone found the mistletoe!”

You searched the crowd, trying to find who the man was talking about, but found that everyone was looking at you. You and Jensen both glanced up at the same time to find you were standing beneath the small plant that had been tied to the mantel with a red ribbon.

You looked at him wide-eyed but remembered that the two of you had an arrangement to appear as a couple. He raised an eyebrow, and when you nodded up to him, a flirty smile graced his lips. His hands came to cradle your face, with yours coming to rest on his forearms as you peered up at him.

Before he could question himself, he laid a feather light kiss against your lips and your eyes fluttered closed. It was quick and enticing, making your nerves stand on end. When you moved to wrap your arms around him, he deepened the kiss, the cheers and clinking of glasses a dull whirl in his ears. Your heart was pounding furiously in your chest and your skin tingled and buzzed, lit aflame at the slightest touch. It felt like every fiber of your body had sparked to life as his fingers danced across your skin and his lips molded to yours, laying small but deep kisses against them. He pulled away but kept you in his embrace, leaning down to whisper in your ear, “We’ll continue this later.” He promised, his voice deep and smooth.

You smiled up at him as you laced your fingers with his that still rested against your cheek, “Yes, please.” You breathed.

Everyone around you had gone back to chatting or eating, ignoring the two people still standing beneath the mistletoe, except for Jared. He’d initially been worried when his old friend Cole had outed that the two of you were under the mistletoe, but now he was grinning from ear to ear, knowing that he just witnessed something special for his two best friends. When he met Jensen’s eyes over the crowd, he jerked his head to the side, signaling that the two of you should leave with a slight smirk.

Jensen shot him a wink and grabbed your hand, pulling you towards Jared’s front door and you gladly followed on unsteady feet, but still feeling as though you could float if needed.

“Hey, Jensen?” you heard a voice call.

It was Melanie again, and Jensen’s grip tightened on you as you shot her a glare.

She stayed a distance away with a guilty but remorseful expression, “I just wanted to apologize. I didn’t have any right to say what I said. I’m sorry.”

Jensen’s hold softened, and he gave her a curt nod, “Thanks.”

She gave a gentle smile and added, “You’re right. I could learn a bit from her.” Before she ducked behind the banister, making her way out of the house and to her car.

You looked to Jensen with a questioning gaze, but he shook his head and gave your hand another reassuring squeeze, “I’ll tell you later, okay? I don’t want to think about it right now.”

He pulled you around to the side of Jared’s house, where there was a large garden and strings of lights illuminating the area. Tugging you towards him, he rounded on you to back you against the brick. You weren’t entirely surprised when he caged you within his arms and leaned in to rest his forehead against yours.

“Y/n.” he breathed, “Is this okay?”

Not trusting your own voice, you nodded.

“Sweetheart, I told you I’d never do anything to ruin our friendship, but I’m afraid I might be about to.”

Even standing in his embrace, the words made a wave of fear course through you and Jensen saw it flash in your eyes. “You’re my best friend, Y/n/n. You’ve been there for me through everything and there’s no one I’d rather have by my side, and I hope what I’m about to say won’t change that.”

With a trembling voice, you asked, “What is it, Jay?”

He tangled his hands into your hair, holding the base of your neck in his palms, “I can’t think of you as just my best friend anymore. I tried. I can’t do it. You’re so much more, Y/n. So, so much more.”

You released a relieved breath, smiling with tears in your eyes as you took his face in your hands, feeling his scruff beneath them. He closed the distance between you even further, pressing his body into yours so that you could feel every ripple of strength and softness that his build provided. Slowly, torturously, he leaned down and gently grazed your lips with his.

Your eyes fluttered shut as you carefully kissed him in return. After a single touch, he pulled back, almost desperately asking for permission. His eyes shown with a mixture of affection and desire as he silently searched your features for any sign of hesitancy. When you nodded up at him, he pressed himself against you and kissed you with more need, his plump lips puzzling to yours with ease.

Jensen’s tongue ran across your lower lip, opening you to him as you gasped into his mouth, the warmth of him flooding your senses as you grasped his shirt in your fists. His hand traveled along the hem of your sweater, lifting it slightly to press his palm against the small of your back, creating chills as the heat sunk into your skin against the chill of the Texas December.

You stayed outside for a while, simply exploring each other in a way you’d never had, with bodies entwined and hands searching out every inch. When you heard people loudly making their way towards their cars and pulling from Jared’s driveway, you returned to the house hand in hand. Jared and Gen were cleaning up the kitchen but stopped when you came through the door. With reddened cheeks and huge grins, there was no denying what you two had been discovering in the depths of their backyard.

You began to help them clean up, you and Jensen hip to hip as you washed and dried the dishes, still beaming at one another.

“So, how’s the ‘fake dating’ thing going, you two?” Gen quipped.

Jensen winked at her, “It may have started as fake, but it’s real now. At least for me it is.”

“Me too... but you and I can talk about that more later.” you said giddily, adding the last part just for him.

Jared spoke up, apologizing for earlier, “I’m sorry about Cole and the, you know, mistletoe.” He said, pointing to the incriminating doorframe.

You laughed and patted his arm for reassurance as Jensen shrugged beside you, “It wasn’t exactly how I wanted our first kiss to happen, but I’m happy it did.” He said, his eyes bright and happy. You didn’t miss that he had thought about your first kiss before that, so you noted to ask him about it later.

The rest of the night was spent laughing and talking with your best friends before the two of you excused yourself to bed. You had a drive to Dallas tomorrow, and your parents were expecting you for lunch.

Jared and Gen each gave you both a hug goodnight and watched you retreat up the stairs, giving each other a high five when you were out of sight.

When you reached your door, Jensen shuffled nervously.

“Do you want to come in?” you asked shyly.

His chest visibly rose and fell as his eyes darkened, but a gentle chuckle left his lips, “Of course I do, Y/n… but I don’t want to move things too fast.”

You giggled, opening the door to your room, “We’re not, Jay. I’m just talking about a sleepover.” You winked, happy when his eyes lit up.

He grabbed his pajamas and changed before meeting you in your room, sighing as he tucked himself underneath the covers and pulling you by your hips to meet his. You fell asleep to the rhythm of his breath in your ear and the rise and fall of his chest against your back, feeling both of your hearts beat along with one another.

To be continued...

………………………………………………………………………………

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theholycovenantrpg · 4 years ago

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CONGRATULATIONS, HINA! YOU’VE BEEN ACCEPTED FOR THE ROLE OF VIKTORIA.

Admin Cas: Hina, I cannot express how delighted we are that you’ve brought us our visionary, our architect, our Viktoria — at long last! You captured them perfectly: from their innate dissatisfaction, to their restless desire, to the inevitability shared between God’s four apocalyptic creations. I think your para sample was a real stand-out for me; you slotted Famine so effortlessly amongst the other Horsemen and you grasped the nature of the relationship between them all so perfectly that it really feels like you’ve been here with us from the start. Your application was such a treat to read, and I’m beyond excited to see what restlessness the two of you’ll unleash upon us! Please create and send in your account, review the information on our CHECKLIST, and follow everyone on the FOLLOW LIST. Welcome to the Holy Land!

OUT OF CHARACTER

Alias | Hina

Age | 24

Personal Pronouns | She/her

Activity Level | 6/10 - full-time student so activity level will fluctuate.

Timezone | GMT

Triggers | REMOVED.

How did you find the group? | through the lsrpg tags

Current/Past RP Accounts | REMOVED.

IN CHARACTER

Character | Viktoria/Famine

What drew you to this character?

So, I have this personal rule where I don’t apply to roleplays that have already started because I get this intense feeling of FOMO, but I kept coming back to Viktoria and was genuinely so surprised that they hadn’t been taken yet. I feel like she was waiting for me to take them up haha.

But on a more serious note, the Horsemen fascinate me like no other faction in this roleplay. There’s something about the bond that they have that surpasses ties of family, love or even just emotion in general. They are bound by their own inevitability as a singular entity and together as a four. Yet, while the Four Horsemen are similar in a lot of ways, with their once shared purpose and existence, Viktoria’s innate dissatisfaction with everything aside from their own creations struck me as something unique that sets them apart from their brethren. If anything their ability to feed on that appetite that she craves has given them the ability to construct and build on a level that is almost, quite literally, God-like. It’s this and the fact that she was created first - not distinct from the other Horsemen because of this reason, they all were formed from a part of God Himself - but Viktoria’s presence, their sheer essence was present and mulling in souls for eons before God created Viktoria and then the rest followed in an instance. While the Horsemen are linked together and will follow each other for the rest of time, I want to explore these two aspects especially in this New World and how Famine’s very nature creates either a fracture between them all or binds them ever closer together.

What also really interests me is the path she taken in this plain, not just as a Mercenary of sorts, but the almost unconscious path she has taken in moulding those that possess that same aching hunger as them. I think for Viktoria this has filled the hole in them ever so slightly after leaving everything she created in Purgatory. But for Viktoria, as I touched on a little before, it’s this dissatisfaction that consistently comes into play which she also projects onto other people. I think if she sees potential in someone, especially if she sees something that matches their level that same restless desperation rises in them of seeking, finding and almost taming them to their own very high standards.

What future plots do you have in mind for the character?

I imagine Viktoria’s future plot lines to be largely based around several other characters in the roleplay, especially that of the other Horsemen, but there are several directions I can see Viktoria going in:

i. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence; I will be a restless wanderer on the earth - the Horsemen’s Purpose

What is really interesting is that one of things that bound the Four Horsemen together is their shared purpose in bringing about the Apocalypse. While their paths may have drifted while in Purgatory, I feel that Viktoria, and potentially the others too, would have relished in there not being a fracture of planes, but an even greater expanse which fulfilled all of their aspirations, an Apocalypse which changed the very fabric of Life itself.

But with that purpose being robbed from them and having been thrust into the mortal plane, not only does this reduce the power that they hold, but I would argue this weakens the bond that they have together. The occupation that they all currently hold, being killers for hire, is a much more solitary occupation than what they were first created for. I think that despite the fact that their planning and preparation is done together, there is a chance that as their personal desires and aims grow through connections with other characters in the roleplay (Viktoria’s specific circumstance I will touch on next), I can see a rift forming between the four of them if that is at all possible. Viktoria’s particular desire for power to create the world in their own image doesn’t trump the bond that she shares with the other Horsemen though. I can imagine that there is a tipping point where Viktoria has a number of paths that she can take for their own benefit, but ever the tactician she is, she would recognise that the power they have together can achieve so much more than splitting off on her own.

Building on the prior point, I also think with the way that the New Order was created, Viktoria imagines there to be another Apocalypse, she can feel the hunger, the aching starvation and the loss of control and I think its only a matter of time before the Horsemen capitalise on it if they don’t get sidetracked.

ii. I am coming quickly; hold fast what you have, so that no one will take your crown - Viktoria + Michael

The connection between Viktoria and Michael is something that I can see going further and absolutely shaking the New World in its entirety.

Viktoria from all of their time manipulating people’s emotions is very much aware of the need and desire that is clawing away at Michael, the fascination that Michael has when he looks upon her. Famine is unable to feel emotion in the same way, but I do think she is able to replicate and even imitate them based on eons of feeling and experiencing those of others around them. I think depending on how their relationship forms in the future, I could see an alliance struck between the two.

However, I think the above depends on other factors:

If the relationship between Michael and the other Arkangels dissolves completely, it could serve as an in for the Horsemen as a collective through Viktoria to go about fulfilling their preordained purpose (or a new one)

Alternatively, if the relationship between Michael and the other Arkangels dissolves completely AND the relationship between Viktoria and the other Horsemen dissolves as well, I can imagine Viktoria’s allegiances and desires turn towards the throne that Michael sits upon for the power it holds in order for her to form what she wants

iii) You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment - killer for hire

Something I want to explore as a plot point is Viktoria’s role as an assassin. As this is something that they and the other Horsemen do as a collective I can imagine them having devised a very clear dichotomy between the roles that each of them play when carrying out a job. Because of Viktoria’s role as a tactician, a creator, a diplomat, I can imagine them not wanting to sully their own hands with the act of taking someone else’s life, but I think also she sees it as beneath them so she somewhat relies on the expertise of the others to carry out the actually act of the job successfully.

As a result of this, I really want there to be an instance where Viktoria is forced or compelled to kill as I think this juxtaposes quite heavily with who she is and would be really interesting to see how it plays out.

iv) A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance - emotions

Throughout this app I’ve mentioned emotions, specifically how Viktoria does not have in. To expand and clarify this, I want to say that Famine doesn’t have any. Famine wasn’t created with the intention of feeling anything but an aching sense of hunger for the Apocalypse. I would even say the dissatisfied, restless emotion she experiences is something that has developed in them. I would like to think thought that since the New Order has been created causing Purgatory to fracture, the price in a way of taking up a mortal name, Viktoria, and almost reducing themselves to the level of a mortal woman has led to Viktoria experiencing their own emotions as well as manipulating other people’s. I think this would really complicate future events or perhaps Viktoria and the other Horsemen would recognise this and attempt to come up with a plan to speed up their agenda depending on the way these emotions were affecting them as a group.

Are you comfortable with killing off your character?

My short answer is yes I would be comfortable with killing off Viktoria.

Long answer that I think warrants some thought before she is killed off:

The death of one of the Horsemen is actually really interesting because in theory they should be dying/dead because they are an embodiment of God in some form. I think this is down to their inevitability and the inevitability of their purpose. So while I believe Viktoria or Ryuk or Nerissa or Dmitri can die I don’t think it’s possible to kill off Famine or Death or War or Conquest.

I think this is the reason why I would want there to be more consideration on the whys and hows if Viktoria is to die. Famine will remain, in the hunger, the starvation and the dissatisfaction that will take hold in others, or with Viktoria’s death something else to replace them will form and be Famine or even take its place.

The death of Viktoria will also change the dynamic of the Horsemen, of which their purpose of bringing about the Apocalypse will be lost, which would be interesting depending on the direction the roleplay goes in.

IN DEPTH

Driving Character Motivation

Right now I think Viktoria’s ultimate desire which also serves as a motivator is to vanquish this restless hunger that’s consuming them once and for all. I think since God created Viktoria and the rest of the Horsemen without a real motivator in mind, she’s found in the eons that she’s been living, the power of creation abates it the most because its only through Viktoria’s own work that she can truly feel the satisfaction that she craves. I think this dissatisfaction spills over in her view of other people which is she wants to mould those, especially those with potential to fit around their standards so she can feed off of it.

Ultimately, its because of the Horsemen’s collective lack of purpose that makes Viktoria motivated to seek out power not only to help their own agenda with potentially bringing about an Apocalypse this time round, but to seek out opportunities in which she can go further than she ever did with their creations in Purgatory with their brethren by their side. I think this will also define Viktoria as less of a person with a mortal’s name but as where she rightfully thinks she should be; Famine, the ever present hunger, starvation and ache that claws through those lesser.

Character Traits

+ Calm: One of the reasons why Viktoria makes a good diplomat and is the one that represents the Horsemen on the political stage is their ability to remain calm and collected and convey the Horsemen’s position and aspirations in a favourable light. She is someone that is easily admirable just as she is formidable. I would say it is because of their calm nature that sets her apart as a leader over the aggressive and war-hungry Nerissa. Viktoria is someone who also never angers easily, preferring to state a few words that have meaning or else say nothing at all and let her plans and actions do the talking.

+ Cunning: Viktoria’s ability to create and map out what she wants and where she wants it makes them impressive in itself, but coupled with their ability to formulate to their and their brethren’s advantage is a skill that is valued highly when plotting to their own agenda and also when carrying out their kills. Viktoria is a long-term strategist preferring to wait and consider their options before striking out with the best one.

+ Instinctive: Viktoria has eons to not only study the emotions of others, but actually feel them through the abilities she possesses. It’s because of this that she has become extremely emotionally aware and is able to more or less tell what sort of emotions are being drawn up in the other person. This has been insightful when it comes to plotting their next marks.

Restless: Viktoria is someone who wants results and she wants them immediately to the highest of standards. Any task that she feels she can do better themselves she’ll do it, but the idea of delegating to someone that isn’t of the same calibre as them irritates them. She has little, if any patience for incompetence. One of the few people she trusts is their fellow Horsemen. I think this restless, easily irritable nature, however, doesn’t win them any points amongst the other factions and especially not the other Horsemen who have to be the literal embodiment of perfection before a good word is uttered by Viktoria.

Manipulative: Every move Viktoria makes and every action that she takes isn’t without an ulterior motive that is there to benefit them or the Horsemen. Its because of this that most people know that Viktoria isn’t one to be trusted no matter how convincing their silver tongue can be.

Unemotional: While Viktoria is able to replicate or even mimic emotion, Viktoria possesses no emotion of their own. Perhaps its because of the way the God created them, with raw starvation and savageness in His mind, or spending many a century deep in the depths of Purgatory, she is unable to express may of the core emotions that others seem to have. Even with the other Horsemen, there’s something innate, almost a primal bond that binds Viktoria with them, perhaps the closest semblance to love she’ll ever be able to feel. Although this is something that I see changing with the length of time she is spending in the Mortal Realm.

In-Character Para Sample

Famine turned to the sharp, jagged opening, their eyes steely and focused on their destination ahead. Their brethren beside them, with the same look of determination frozen onto their faces. Famine newly formed, newly arrived knew almost intrinsically that these three were instrumental to their success. Their joint success of bringing about the destruction of the Worlds that He had created, for where there was creation, there would be a a slow degradation that the Four were feeding off of long before their conception.

Famine looked upon the jagged piece of cut air, the friction lined with a sliver of gold a beacon that did not serve as their waiting room before they were unleashed upon God’s Earth. They stepped in together, a cold rage burning in the pit of their hollow stomach, as they stared at the bleak expanse of space full of the lingering tortured souls that had not managed to reach Heaven or Hell. It wasn’t as if Famine would have rather been amongst their Creator’s other subjects in either of the other two realms. The mere glimpse of Heaven and its blinding light was just as dull to them as its inhabitants. Famine could sense their brethren’s pursuit for other tasks as she moved forward with their own. What would she make of the expanse in front of them? What purpose did it serve if they were meant to lay here in wait for the downfall of everything that was holy, everything that was impure and everything in between? And what was she supposed to do here? Famine was no mere mortal and the place they were in was not Eden. She could not and would not pluck the metaphorical apple from the tree and take a bite to give them free will. No. Famine had a purpose, they all did. And so she would stay in the deepest of recesses of hunger, laying in want with a need to be fed and a desire of more from their very existence.

And so she wandered the realm’s depths, Famine, who was created from a starved piece of flesh, who was ordered to carry out the end of all of His creations and cast away along with their brothers and sister until the time was right did what she was told. Until she didn’t. With God’s gaze above, managing His unruly subjects, Famine chose to set themselves on their own path. Manifesting their dissatisfaction into something tangible into something that she could taste, something that she could feel. Famine had to barely reach out from the depths of their mind to weave together an image of their own design. She wondered as she crafted and composed the dilapidated pillars of their glass fortress one day whether it was the divinity in them that allowed them to formulate and construct the way that she did. But Famine need only have taken a step back and gazed upon their crooked kingdom to see that the power that she possessed was entirely their own.

ii.

Viktoria descended from, Albtraum, their gaunt skeletal steed, just outside of the building in which they knew their brethren sat waiting for their arrival. She caressed the curve of his starved face in what can only be described as affectionate if it was at all possible for them to feel such an emotion. Viktoria had taken to travelling to The Holy Hall on their creature, it was purely political after all. It was essential that the factions remembered the Horsemen’s status amongst them all, the last thing she wanted for them was their own place in the house of cards to topple, like Creator, like Created.

She walked up the steps to the dimly lit hall they were sat in, their gaze took them in, each a handful of chaos and each far too complacent with the New Order than she had liked. It was one thing following them out of their vision of Purgatory to the opaque opulence of this plain to then be reduced as a collective, as mere remnants of God’s corporeality. No. Viktoria wouldn’t let their descent go any further. She would feed Ryuk with as many decimations as he desired, she would work in Nerissa’s bloodlust and settle Dmitri’s whims in their plans if it meant that they would follow in their ascent. They only needed time and patience and resilience so she could work to mould and manipulate the upper echelons of government. They all knew better, as Viktoria did with them, to go against their unrivalled ability to formulate.

Viktoria nodded at each, in respect, before taking a seat at the table, waiting for one to speak with the burning questions that she knew they possessed.

“Michael, again?” Nerissa spoke an ever-present impatience permeating their voice.

Viktoria looked at them their eyes resigned at the picture that had been created almost involuntary, without their permission. She hated not having a choice. “Yes, it would seem we have landed on a treasure trove.”

“But it is a matter that solely concerns you, sister, not us.” Ryuk interjected, for the first time addressing the unspoken tensions that threw a spotlight on the friction between them all since they stepped out of the middling realm.

Dmitri, with as much solidarity as they possessed reached over, clasping their hand in their own. Viktoria smiled coldly at Ryuk, not before squeezing Dmitri’s hand in reassurance. She was calm; she was controlled.

“Surely, Death,” she emphasised, wanting to remind them all of their position that had been clouded by mortal names and mortal feelings. “You value the hold of your status than of a few mortal souls?”

There was silence. Viktoria knew they hesitated, they had been stripped of their purpose, they knew of nothing else.

“We must continue to play their game,” Dmitri spoke.

Viktoria nodded, a wave of satisfaction washing over the itch that she knew was pent up in them as well as in the others. “Until the time is right.” Because when time was right, Viktoria knew she would be Famine once again, the three Horsemen by their side looking over an endless sea of destruction and doom.

Extras

Not that great at graphics etc so will be thinking of headcanons as I write and develop Viktoria more!

#accepted #accepted: viktoria

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stygiantarot · 5 years ago

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Modern Divination Methods

(originally taught in The Alexandria Archives on 4/9/2020)

Divination is most certainly one of the oldest practices of witchcraft. Reading omens, trancing for prophecy/scrying, and using tools to read symbols or patterns have all been used in some form for practically as long as society has existed. Many people are familiar with the mainstream ones: Tarot, runes, tea leaves, scrying, etc. Last time I went over some more unusual methods. Today, in light of the current global situation having many person’s stuck in limited spaces with limited supplies, I thought we could touch on some modern methods. Most require nothing more than what you already have at your fingertips!

We will explore in some detail:

Shufflemancy: divination using randomized songs

Stichomancy: divination using passages in a volume of writing

Traffic omens: Modernizing weather style omen reading using things like cars, stoplights, types of buildings passed, etc.

We’ll also touch on a couple other ideas you might try expanding on:

Online Randomizer: Think like the old web extension Stumble upon or even those websites that give you random quotes, images, names, etc.

Social Media Image Scrying: using a collection of images online to select a particular one for interpretation.

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Shufflemancy

Many of you have probably heard of this method, likely even tried it! Shufflemancy is the method of divination that uses a platform or application to randomize a selection/playlist of songs for interpretation. You can either just hit the shuffle button once and go with that initial song or you can incorporate a more personalized experience by having the querent choose a number of skips to hit. It can also be tailored by using specific playlists you’ve compiled or certain genre options on applications like Spotify or Pandora.

You can expand on this with applications like Youtube to include videos. It’s my fantasy that platforms like Netflix or Hulu will come up with a “randomizer” or shuffle type option someday. It would be such a blast to play a random video and then use that for divination!

It’s important to take into account both the lyrics and the melody/mood of the music when your selection is being interpreted. If you aren’t sure if you’d be comfortable with that initially, I recommend building a “beginner’s” sort of playlist that is filled with songs you know very well and have personal feelings about. It makes the interpretation that much easier. Much like using a Tarot or Oracle deck that has art styles or characters you’re familiar with. You may also incorporate the visuals of a music video if there is one for the song. Shufflemancy usually works better for more expansive readings rather than just yes/no questions. Although you can sometimes get that sort of immediately “positive” or “negative” impression from many songs, assuming it doesn’t have both!  

This method is a therapeutic way to delve into some modern divination. The emotional and cathartic aspect can be soothing for both the reader and the querent. Not to mention the connection it builds as you share music between you. A feel good way to practice some divination with no physical tools beyond some technology access.

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Stichomancy

This method of divination, sometimes called bibliomancy, uses a book or similar volume of writing to select passages from to interpret. Most people use the page number as the way to select, telling the querent to select a number between the first and last page (and what the highest number possible is). But there are intuitive methods as well. Using the physical shuffling of pages until it feels right to stop rather than a selected number. I find the latter method more useful when reading for myself and the former method more cooperative when I’m reading for others.

Like with shufflemancy, stichomancy is much affected by your personalizing of the tool. Use books you love! Use books that have specific genres for specific queries (a romance book for a relationship reading?). Use anthologies (short story or poetry collections) to get a variety of styles and language to work with.    

You can also use books that are more visual, like my headstone symbolism book pictured above. It makes the reading more akin to Tarot, but you can use captions to help expand on the interpretation. Practice trial and error with multiple books until you feel comfortable and confident that the results are accurate enough. The books I have in the photo I shared are the five I’m comfortable using in regular readings. I play with others for myself or specific queries for friends or family but often I’m not comfortable adding them to my regular repertoire. I have a series of dimestore style paperback mysteries that love to give readings for a dear friend but are useless in accuracy for anyone else. Books have personalities- if you didn’t already know that this method will teach you that fact quickly. You can also create your own specific stichomancy book using a notebook with numbered short passages and poems of that have significance to you. It can be an enriching process to collect all the passages to add to your own book and you can give them more specific and more easily remembered associations when compiling them yourself. Do remember to give proper credit/sourcing to all your collected passages though! 

You don’t need the largest book possible to be effective with this method of divination. “Desperation” and “Chilling Ghost Short Stories” are my thickest books, but honestly I’ve gotten more insightful readings from my two slim fairy tale volumes. It’s truly a method you make your own. I have friends who prefer to exclusively use books of poetry rather than fictional prose. That is good too!

A note: don’t feel like you need to have a physical book- I’ve had some success with ebooks! It can be trickier to do the flip-through for sure, but not impossible. 

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Traffic Omens

I was probably about 8 years old when I first played the “If, Then” game. “If this next light turns green before we reach it, then I’ll get McDonalds for lunch.” A simple and almost childish game of course. But essentially, traffic omens. I expanded on it as I got older to include seeing certain makes and colors of cars during my commute. Or a certain number of common buildings like churches or banks. A type of architecture or statues featuring certain things. It can be as common or uncommon as your needs require.

This is a method that’s a little trickier to lay out for others in step-by-step ways because it is omen based and therefore requires you to select what works for your specific area/region, what type of commute based omens you feel comfortable noticing, what meanings they have for you, etc. And since this is omen-based, it isn’t exactly ideal for actively standard divination reading. It’s more ideal for a passive style, or personal predictions in your own life.

You can build a system that works for you and could predict luck in a career, prosperity in the home, or a new friend. I recommend starting a journal of the sort of “omens” you notice on your commute. Follow up with a short blurb about how your day went and how you felt. Then you can refer back to it and create the personal system from there. You can vary the more common with uncommon omens- just remember to ascribe the appropriate association. Seeing a certain number of bank buildings can be good for meaning an increase in general finances but you’d likely want something more uncommon like an usual make and model of a single car for snagging a dream job. You can also create variations for when you’re walking during your day instead of commuting! 

 A bit more involved but something interesting to experiment with in our modern society. And keep a bit of that childlike wonder!

~~~~~~~

Online Randomizer

Did you ever play with the web extension “Stumble Upon” back when it existed? The idea was that you installed it in whatever web browser you happened to be using and then clicked it to get directed to an entirely random website. Though it’s intention was obviously to curb boredom, it is definitely something interesting to try as a divination tool. Stumble Upon no longer exists (as far as I know), however there are similar extensions or webpages that let you do the same thing (this one comes to mind: https://theuselessweb.com). There is also options like Wikipedia’s “random article” ability that works along the same lines. This method is similar to stichomancy in that you’ll likely be working with text a lot of the time. But be aware of the medium you’re working with- a webpage is more than just a page in a book. What is its purpose? How well is it designed? What sort of visuals does it use? What emotional impressions do you get from it? It can start simple, but you can see the options are there for expanding an interpretation pretty elaborately. And again, a number of clicks can be incorporated if you like.

~~~~~~~

Multi-Image Scrying (Social Media Image Scrying)   

It’s hard for me to come up with a concise name for this. But it’s possible you’ve come across persons doing this on various platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc. There is a selection of images in a format similar to a moldboard to view. The reader has a querent select an image that stands out to them and builds a reading based on the selection. Similar to a random draw from a Tarot or Oracle card with symbolism and art imagery lending itself to the interpretation. This can be great to try if you are into color symbolism or can easily see how certain artwork evokes certain emotions. Similar to what websites like Buzzfeed or the astro.com color chart quiz is! Almost like an alternative horoscope based on visual selections you are drawn to.

Be sure to ethically collect images for something like this if you plan on offering it to others. There are many websites that have royalty free images you can use for projects like this. Or you can even use ones you have yourself! These don’t have to be high art photographs, simple ones on your phone can absolutely work. The biggest goal is to make sure they are varied so a large amount of interpretation is possible.

There is a version of this using face down Tarot (or oracle) cards as well. You take a photo (or have video) of them face down and then have your querent select one at random without either of you knowing what it is. Then once you flip it over you can giving a reading based on that. It’s not especially different from a standard long distance Tarot reading except it can be used on a mass scale. For example, I’ve done this for my business Facebook or Instagram where I have a grid of numbered face down cards. Then I put the meanings of each card in the comments so someone can select the card before reading the comments and get a low-tech daily reading without an app.

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Even though many of these methods evoke playful games of childhood, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have potential as a valid form of divination. Many forms of divination in the past started as games or ways to pass time before they were built into the forms of divination we know today. A modern technique may seem “sillier” to traditionalists but just like younger generations are proving the further reaching use of modern technology to previous generations; it is time to prove the modern forms of divination as valid to the traditionalists!

#divination #stichomancy #shufflemancy #types of divination #witchblr #TAA #fortune telling #witchcraft class #witchcraft 101 #modern divination #modern witchcraft #witchy #modern omens

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jerry618 · 2 years ago

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TFT vs AMOLED Display

Email: [email protected]

WhatsApp & Wechat: +86 18038197291

www.xygledscreen.com

What is TFT Display

What is AMOLED Display

Differences Between TFT and AMOLED Display

1. TFT

Pros

The color display is fantastic. Color intensity, sharpness, and luminance settings that are second to none and can be customized to meet the needs of any application.

As it is more affordable than capacitive, resistive is typically the preferred option. However, capacitive technology is compatible with a wide range of contemporary smartphones and digital gadgets.

Cons

The pricing is higher than that of other displays available in the market.

Viewing angles that are out of proportion

Due to the apparent glass panels, there is limited functionality. For instance, there are ineffective for outdoor use because the glass can display glares from its natural lighting)

2. AMOLED

Pros

An AMOLED's organic plastic layers are lighter, thinner, and much more bendable than LED or LCD crystal layers.

While AMOLED light-emitting sheets are lightweight, the substrate can also be elastic rather than stiff. AMOLED films are not limited to glass-like LEDs and LCDs.

AMOLEDs offer 170-degree ranges of vision. LCDs operate by obscuring the light. Hence they have intrinsic viewing obstacles. In addition, AMOLEDs have a substantially wider viewing spectrum.

AMOLEDs seem to be simpler to implement and larger. AMOLEDs are constructed of polymers and may be produced into big sheets. It takes a lot of extra liquid crystals to build and set down.

Cons

While red and green AMOLED sheets have a greater lifespan (46,000 to 230,000 hours), azure compounds have significantly shorter longevity (up to roughly 14,000 hours).

Manufacturing methods are currently cost-prohibitive.

AMOLEDs are susceptible to damage by water.

Which to Choose Under Different Situations: TFT vs AMOLED Display

Light Emission

Better Brightness

Energy Consumption

Conclusion: TFT vs AMOLED Display

#www.xygledscreen.com #xygled #ledscreen #led display #xinyiguang

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graphcoalportrait · 2 years ago

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Personalized Gifts and Beyond: The Magic of Custom Portrait Painting

A Brief History of Portrait Painting

The Significance of Custom Portrait Painting

Custom portrait painting holds a special place in the world of personalized gifts for several reasons:

Preserving Legacy: Custom portraits become family heirlooms. They tell the story of generations, preserving the faces and stories of loved ones for future generations to cherish.

Decorative Art: Beyond sentimental value, custom portraits are beautiful pieces of art. They can enhance the aesthetic of any space, adding a personal touch to home decor.

The Process of Creating a Custom Portrait

1)Creating a custom portrait painting involves collaboration between the artist and the client. Here's a simplified overview of the process:

2)Select an Artist: Begin by choosing an artist whose style aligns with your vision for the portrait.

3)Consultation: Have a consultation with the artist to discuss your ideas, preferences, and the size of the portrait.

4)Reference Photos: Provide high-quality reference photos that capture the subject's likeness and any specific details you want to include.

5)Artistic Interpretation: The artist will interpret the photos and bring them to life on canvas or paper, often adding their artistic flair.

6)Feedback and Revisions: You'll have the opportunity to review the work in progress and request revisions if needed.

7)Finalizing the Portrait: Once you're satisfied with the portrait, the artist will complete it, ensuring it meets your expectations.

The Magic of Personalized Gifts

Conclusion

In a world filled with fleeting digital images, custom portrait painting stands as a timeless and enduring form of personalized gifting. It's a magical way to celebrate life's special moments, preserve cherished memories, and express love and appreciation. So, consider the gift of a custom portrait for your next special occasion, and let its beauty and sentimentality create lasting memories for you and your loved ones.

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wexhappyxfew · 4 years ago

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SHANNON!! HELLO MY FRIEND ☺️☺️ hope you're having a lovely day!! Okay you know I absolutely your character Death, so whatever you want to talk about with him :)

KRYSTAAAA hello my friend! I hope you are having a great day yourself! You sent this yesterday but I wanted to take my time with this as discuss one of my *FAVORITE* things about Death in this post - appearance and reasons WHY he appears this way. I know we don’t see actual images, but I try to work with the description in Landslide to give Death, in my personified way, an appearance - because in my mind he has an appearance, quite similarly to a man - LET ME STOP MYSELF WE’LL GET INTO IT BELOW HAHA!!! AW THANKS!! :,) I’m so glad you enjoy it truly, that means so much and I’ve worked to really develop Him and His character all together along with His role with Natia because it is one of the most important connections Natia holds with someone in Landslide - even though they can’t ever speak - AGH I LOVE IT!! Let’s get into it!

SO -- we are going to work with 4 general images that I’ve always envisioned Death as and I’ll really talk about WHY I have Him as such because there are reasons why these pictures are the way they are and why I decided on these pictures for Him!

Let’s solidify two things first!

(1) When I created Death in general, I wanted to make Him a male, just because I saw Death as male in my mind and for the dynamic of the story it would work best. But for a spin-off from Landslide (there may be a few!) I’ve thought about digging into another aspect which is - in this sort of fic, Death is seen in the way the seer wishes to see Death, which I think is pretty cool! There’s a reason though Natia sees Death as male....ahem...Agent Mortem I’m looking at you.

(2) The two important things to touch on with the Death I’ve created - cloaks and wings - cloaks (+hood) have been broguht up a various amount of times already for Death n the 26 chapters of posted Landslide chapters and content BUT we have yet to discuss wings. I can’t jump TOO into that yet exactly, but that is the second most important aspect of Death I’ve crafted together! Keep that in mind!

OKAY...now that we have all of that put together, let’s jump into it - 4 pictures, 4 ideas - WE LOVE TO SEE IT!! There may also be a cut somewhere below - idk where, but it’ll be there! Enjoy!

AND AS A SIDE NOTE - THESE IMAGES ARE FROM PINTEREST SO NONE OF THESE IMAGES ARE ACTUALLY MINE OR CREATED BY ME!!!

FIRST IMAGE: This is probably the best, accurate description and image of Death in my eyes at least - I’m sure the readers have envisioned Him differently (just imagine He has a cloak on and it’s covering His head LOL!) - but in many ways this is my portrayal of how I envision Death. Almost looking as if he is a regular man - dark tousled hair, a grey coat, dark boots - the works! But he’s quite sad, this wandering person, aimlessly moving about and he’s quite grief-filled. And so, that’s a reason I particularly love this photo because we get the head focused downward to convey this portrayal of grief and how consuming it is. I really wasn’t out to make Death this emotionless person who just takes and takes - I wanted in my portrayal to show how much pain he holds - and how he is protecting Natia with all His might from someone like Himself because He can’t bare to do His duty that He has for eternity on Natia.

AND THE WINGS!! Okay, wings - we get more into the wings at the end of part 3 and extremely expanded in part 4 - but wings are extremely important. They are in fact black and feathered - I begin to reference him at the end of Part 3 as if he were a ‘Father of Ravens’ in a sense because of what a raven represents and for Death’s character I feel that is very true to his character specifically His role He takes in with Natia. You might even see him int he form of ravens as we come particularly out of Bastogne and the weather gets warmer - it will be very prominent.

I would say this is my absolute favorite - if you ever need a reference - this is image is 100% what I would have crafted for Death if he were portrayed in a picture!

SECOND IMAGE: Here is an absolute FAVORITE!!! (1) We know Natia sees Death essentially as male (for various reasons regarding Agent Mortem who literally is Agent Death or Agent of Death if we want - but that’s for another ask!) and so this I would say is a very good representation of the wings + ravens + eyes + profile of Death. The narrow-eye expression of his facial features if very prominent - Natia does much of the same - and let’s just say Death has picked that up as well. He sees the world really in blacks, whites and greys - similar to how Natia views the world because of Agent Mortem ( a morally grey character) and so I really took all of that and worked with it in this way! Natia, Death and Mortem are the mains in my mind and so they all see the world in grey - but who will break from that? They’re all connected with one another in many ways - who will break that?

But yes, in this picture, I go off the fact that in Landslide, Death will take the form of a raven as his best chance to get closer to Natia, to even try and interact with her and that is very prominent at the end of Part 3 and all of Part 4 and even some postwar!

THIRD IMAGE: OKAY - so here is where we get into more of the ‘cloaked figure’ that encompasses Death and this image of his cloaked figure. The cloak hides quite a lot of things and one of those things are his wings - which don’t really make an appearance until the end of Part 3 for various reasons! Which I can’t say just yet :) But it also hides his face - his expressions - why might you ask does he want to particularly hide that?

Let’s reference the most recent chapter update - Chapter 26, entitled Weapons Don’t Weep. (1) Natia is in fact a weapon, not only crafted by War, who makes his somewhat annual appearance, but also my Agent Mortem - who’s to say Death might’ve also crafted her? (2) Death and Natia have a unique connection - they can’t communicate through words, they can’t really communicate through much if you think about it - just feelings, emotions, thoughts. SO - this just adds onto evidence of how Death actually can control her a bit. The chaos that ensued at the end of Chapter 26 was a precursor to that - he can control her chaos, she can’t control his. The closing of his eyes - he uses a cloak to hide that he is abusing his power of control on her - and letting chaos warp her. NOW THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING - A MERE PRECURSOR AS STATED. We’ll get into it much later on and why, but the cloak covers wings + facial expressions for good reasoning.

AND THE HORSE YOU MAY ASK? Well...I did call Natia a dark horse right? The definition of a dark horse is “a candidate or competitor about whom little is known but who unexpectedly wins or succeeds.” Not only is Natia a lone wolf BUT she is very much a dark horse - you don’t know much but she manages to win her battles - she may not win the war, but she will wage a battle and win what she must to survive, that’s the name of the game currently. Plenty of times in discussion - it’s like Death and Natia at a game of poker, in a black room (as described by a friend!!) and that’s very real almost every chapter that is written and published - a tension continually building, awaiting to see what will happen next, and just a constant build off of that over and over again. She takes on the persona of a dark horse more often than not - she’s underestimated, never entirely trusted, yet she survives?! People start to take that into consideration, especially in Bastogne - BUT THAT IS FOR ANOTHER TIME!!!! :D

FOURTH IMAGE: OKAY NOW -- this is sort of the expected image - Death with his cloak, a cane, dark gloves, shadowed face that you can’t see. This is the image I imagine when I am writing and Death is sort of watching Natia from afar - purposely I place him in those scenarios for various reasons depending on what is happening in that time during the story. And this is the image he sort of takes on. I don’t have many notes particularly for this image, only simply the fact that this is what masks what is portrayed in the first image - it covers the wings, the facial expressions, the man that is evidently underneath and simply that a man - yet a being forever wandering aimlessly, doing his duty given for all of eternity. But I really think this is what most will remember the Death I chose to personify him by! :D

OKAY SO THIS WAS SERIOUSLY JUST SO FUN OMG!!! This is the first time I’ve used pictures to really dig into what I’m getting at with characters - especially handling a character to the capacity in which Death withholds - there’s a lot to unpack with Him! But I truly hope you enjoyed this - I’m always happy to do more of these for any of my characters - especially even War, or Natia, or Agent Mortem - I might even just do it for fun who knows - OF COURSE WHEN I HAVE TIME HAHA!!! But I really enjoyed this so thank you for indulging and enabling Krysta!!! This was super fun to give my in-depth take on someone like Death and how I decided to craft and personify him!

#band of brothers #landslide #bob fic #bob oc #natia filipska #natia + death #we have some pictures we have some descriptions #we have analysis #we have just a whole lotta stuff to unpack here #YEAH ITS QUITE JUST CHAOTIC THIS ENTIRE THING BUT WE LOVE THAT DONT WE!!! HAHAHA

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nutty1005 · 5 years ago

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(Fluff warning) Why is Xiao Zhan a god-tiered beauty? A deep shallow analysis…

Original Article:https://www.weibo.com/ttarticle/p/show?id=2309404476336126165027#_0 Original Author: 织世靳靳子

(TN: This is a fluff piece, written entirely by a fan to praise his good looks. There is also quite a fair bit of Chinese beauty standards in this. Enjoy the pictures!)

(TN: Also, beauty should be beyond gender boundaries.)

What properties should a god-tiered beauty have?

When you think of a god-tiered beauty, who pops into your mind immediately? Is this adulation, or is Xiao Zhan worthy of this praise?

When a person is considered a god-tiered beauty, it usually means that this person is flawless, but is this absolutely politically correct?

I think not.

Beauty comes from imperfection, and they do not need to be hidden, because vividness comes from such imperfections. Audiences can be very sharp – no matter how much “beautiful” labels you attach on a person, these labels will not stay if the person cannot uphold these labels. The entertainment business is full of attractive people, but when you remove the make up and filters, you can really gauge the true physical attractiveness of a person.

I got a lot of surprise studying Xiao Zhan.

When deciding if someone looks good, we do not linger on how big his/her eyes are, or how tall his/her nose is, but instead we look at the proportion and general aesthetic.

If you were to choose the magical touch on Xiao Zhan’s face, which feature will you choose?

I would choose his eyes.

The truth is that in terms of absolute size, Xiao Zhan’s eyes are not very big, but it stands out because of their aesthetically pleasing shape.

The shape of his eyes appears to be almond-shape (but more stunning), with a full lower eyelid and rounded upper eyelid. This gives off a sense of innocence when he looks up. In addition, the the shape of his eyes slant downwards but the outer ends hook up, and with the shadows of his thick lashes, which brings his shape closer to what the Chinese call “Phoenix Eyes”. All in all, the shape of his eyes is one of the rarest eye shape – “Favored Phoenix Eyes”.

The lines of his eyes have always been aesthetically pleasing, but this is further enhanced once he had learned to control his gaze (see X-Fire competition period). The focus of his face is on his beautiful and lively eyes, which elevates the entire aesthetics.

Inner eye corners are more rounded among the Chinese, but because his eyes are pointed and long, giving off a very oriental appeal.

If you study carefully, you will notice that his eyes follow an “S” line. His inner eye corners are rounded, the outer edges slant gently downwards but quickly end with an upward tilt. This is a very rare type of demure oriental beauty. His usual make up is very light and natural, but if there are additional touches on his outer edges, bringing emphasis onto the lines of his eyes, his aura will switch from harmless and innocent to sharp and aggressive.

You probably cannot stop yourself from imagining dating him

When he is not smiling, you can feel that sharp and aggressiveness off him. He gives off a nobility aura and he can keep up his appearances at any event.

In videos, his eyes are large and energetic, and so alluring, it is almost as though these eyes belong to an anime character or a CGI character. Given that we know that the camera would magnify flaws and moderate the overall aesthetic level, we can only imagine how he looks like behind that camera, and it is probably not that “normal good looking person” like he says he is.

Xiao Zhan does not depend on strong features – his brow bone and nose ridge are not tall.

Rounded features, not strong

If I were a famous director, I would be very satisfied with Xiao Zhan as an actor. In my Weibo pinned post, I spoke about how he does not depend on shading make up to sharpen his features, but instead, he depends on simply on lighting. This is evidence of his good bone structure. He does not have the standard issues of sunken temples or broad zygomatic bow (TN: the bone area to the side of the eyes) that are common among Asian faces; his zygomatic bow does not broaden sideways, but instead expands outwards proportionately. This advantageous bone structure shows itself most evidently in period dramas, where an aura of heroism is required. This balances out his soft features.

This is an unedited raw image from a HD camera – his features are simply enhanced just by lighting

This face of his looks good in any lighting. Under paramount lighting, his cheekbones stand out and makes his face even smaller. (TN: Smaller faces are considered more aesthetically pleasing in Chinese culture.) Under rembrandt lighting, his gaze becomes more vivid, and the shadows from his nose and cheeks makes the picture more dramatic.

The Chinese have 4 ways to describe dimensions on facial structure – tall, low, flat and sunken. Most Chinese faces have low nose bridges and sunken structure, and for those who have this, when seen on HDTV, their facial muscle movements can be very obvious. In the case of Xiao Zhan, his facial muscle movements are clean and his facial expressions are especially pleasing, even when expressing extreme emotions. In addition, he does not require special lighting and can even withstand odd lighting.

Looks good even when expressing extreme emotions

This is the true meaning of “no bad angles”.

This is a random screen capture off a HD video. Still beautiful.

Generally, if anyone of us takes a picture from this angle, we probably end up looking like crap, but Xiao Zhan looks as thought he had been touched by Aphrodite. His cheekbones is the olive branch from Cyprus; his lips are the roses from Damascus; his Adam’s apple is the shackles of Prometheus, Mount Kaukasos. From head to toe, he is the real life representation of the sonnets of Shakespeare.

His beauty is breathtaking.

He looks like he descended from anime-land, but yet more vivid than ever

At the same time, Xiao Zhan’s features are tight knitted and his eyes sit lower in his face. This gives him a general youthfulness, hence he seems a lot younger than his actual age. I have often felt that his face looks almost anime-like, and in some instances, his expressions make him seem almost unreal.

If we try to convert some of our favorite anime characters to actual humans, how would they look like? From the side profile, the eyes should be position lower, almost towards the middle of the nose bridge. However, it is very difficult for this to occur while maintaining proper facial proportions.

We can immediately see from this picture that the middle section of his face is not too long. A long middle section usually ages a person.

Under further study, you will realize that the mouth-lip area of his face is not too short either. However, his philtrum (the midline groove in the upper lip) is deep and slightly pointed upwards, which moderates the length visually.

The shape of his lips are rounded, but given his sharp eyes and tall nose, the “roundness” and “sharpness” matches in equilibrium, resulting in him looking incredible whenever he smiles.

I am an art student and I am studying his features simply from the angle of an art model, instead of the angle of his fan. The conclusion I have drawn is that his facial features are simply outstanding. Plastic surgery may be able to change the facial features, but will not be able to change proportion; moreover, we know that Xiao Zhan did not go through any of that.

In general, people with good facial proportions will standout in a crowd, more so with Xiao Zhan, who has great features, and these will be especially brilliant after he has good control of his facial expressions.

You cannot hide the smile even if you cover the lower half of his face

Xiao Zhan is an expert in facial expressions control. His smiles can be viewed over and over again, and they are not easy to recreate – I have slowed down GIFs to capture his expression sequence.

When bringing forth a smile, he will move the muscles around this eyes to bring up the outer edges, and this brings the joy onto his face even if you cover the lower half of his face.

He pays attention to the movement of the muscles on this brow and the area around his eyes, such that he is able to pinpoint the emotions in this gaze. This is actually not easy to do such that it looks continuous and natural.

The essence of facial expression control comes from knowing your weaknesses during the training done in front of the mirror, and correcting them. I’m guessing here that he spent a lot of effort in his training, not because he has a lot of weaknesses, but because he has always been very strict with himself.

This is his signature smile. He has a multitude of combinations in his expressions, none of them fixed in any categories but serialized, and recreated in sequence when needed. If not for that fact that he sweats so much, I would have thought that he is an AI, but then again, could AI create this magnificence? I think not.

Xiao Zhan’s signature smile is smooth and stunning – it captivates people because of his confidence and ease.

The entertainment business has always been filled with beautiful people, but what makes Xiao Zhan stand out is the purity in him. He stuns people around him his clear eyes and his innocent smiles – and we pray that he will never lose this.

I know this – with his good bone structure, he will remain handsome for at least another 30 years.

Xiao Zhan is not just a “top celebrity” of this area, but he will also become “that god of period dramas” some decades later, and he will continue to shine bright as an icon of this generation.

#xiao zhan #sean xiao #xiaozhan #肖战

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