#but if you do now... stick to pre-2016 stuff at least :))

[yellowloid]

The more time passes, the more I am convinced that TLSPs will never come back or perhaps in the very distant future. The Car is an album very similar to the sounds of the duo and I find it difficult that they can come back with a third album with the genre of the previous one. I feel like Alex has sort of found his genre and things to draw inspiration from and Miles currently does a completely different genre than what AM does. Alex has clear ideas and I believe that at the moment he is thinking about himself, he is determined to continue with this style, I have no doubt that in the future he will be able to change again but it is very difficult that he returns as in 2016

(ugh i'm so late this was sent like. MONTHS ago but life has been hectic)

anyways, i think as fans we really have no way of knowing whether tlsp will ever actually come back with a third album. of course we can all hope for it to happen, but in the end the only people who have a say on it are - you guessed it - miles and alex themselves. and although i agree on the fact that their latest albums were different from one another, that doesn't necessarily mean they'll *always* stick to those styles. they're always evolving as musicians and that's what makes their music good, and yeah you could certainly say the latest albums (tbhc+the car / coup de grace+change the show) are much more mature and elaborate than their earlier stuff (which is normal because they've grown as artists and people), that still doesn't mean they've "arrived" as artists. they'll keep changing and maturing and evolving in their style, and who knows what they'll release next with their solo projects.

(also, although i partly agree on the fact that their current styles are different, i wouldn't say they're so inherently opposite from each other??? although the "jazz" vibes in change the show are very much absent from the car, i can't help but think of songs such as 'coming of age' and 'constantly' which are very close in sound to songs they've written together or that alex has been recommending over the years. and although right now he doesn't make that kind of music himself, it doesn't mean he doesn't appreciate it/wouldn't consider ever making something like that. vice versa, the same applies to miles) (we also have to take into consideration the fact that those two have influenced each other so much over the years, both with their solo stuff and tlsp - see the strings, which are a crucial part of the car and which are an obvious and natural evolution of the iconic tlsp strings)

plus, the fact that their solo styles are different rn doesn't mean they wouldn't mix well! those two work magic when they're together. they're so talented and they bring the best out of each other, they could literally make a masterpiece out of mixing those two styles or even creating a new one that is shared between the two of them. there are points in common they could easily play on - for instance, the very strong bond vibes they've been hinting at ever since eycte. when it comes to them, the possibilities are quite literally endless - they don't have to stick to anything (not to their solo styles, and not to their 2008 or 2016 ones either) because the point of tlsp is and always has been pure freedom of creation. the art they make together doesn't have to appeal to a pre-written rule. tlsp is the safe space where they can be completely free to do whatever they want, together, and that's exactly what makes this project so beautiful.

now to be practical... i sincerely doubt they'll be back in 2024, unless they've already been working on tlsp3 secretly - which i don't think is the case. they don't really have much time before 2024 comes, and with alex touring for the car for the better part of 2023 and miles being busy with (pre-)recording of mk5 (or at least already working on it), throwing tlsp3 into the mix would be quite difficult to deal with.

that being said, i can't even begin to express how much i'd love for them to be back as soon as possible. but aside from that, i'm willing to wait as much as i'll have to, no matter how long it takes - as long as they come back in the end, and i'm 100% convinced they will. we just have to give them the time they need. and remember, anon: hope is the last to die!

[distort-opia]

Hi :) I feel, as a big Bat-comic fan, you probably watched a lot of DC shows and cartoons (or at least Batman related). Do you watch superhero productions not DC related? If I remember correctly, you once mentioned Loki.

Currently? Not... really. I didn't even finish Loki, only got to episode 2 or 3, because it went entirely downhill from there, characterization-wise. For me, both Thor and Loki as characters are not the same ever since Ragnarok. Which I am bitter about, because I used to love Loki a lot.

But this makes it obvious I have watched Marvel stuff, besides DC :)) I haven't kept up with all their TV series, but from the more recent ones, I did like WandaVision (minus the finale, I am still pissed off about it) and Moon Knight. God, really loved Moon Knight, fully recommend it. I liked Jessica Jones too, and the first season of Daredevil. But, in general, I've gotten just as disillusioned with Marvel as everyone else on this webbed site, so I've long stopped actively following their stuff. That being said... I have seen (checks letterboxd list) 82% of all existing Marvel movies, apparently. Sigh. I even watched Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness, which had the sole redeeming qualities of camp horror and seeing Wanda go feral (because ohoho, that cameo from Patrick Stewart as Charles Xavier made me so mad; it was utilized in the dumbest, most OOC way). But I'm certainly not planning on going to watch any other Marvel movie very soon. Maybe pirating one, but not paying for it.

X-Men though! I've watched both the original and the newer movies, plus the X-Men animated series from the 90's and X-Men: Evolution (which is great). If I haven't been insane about it enough on this blog, I must say I love Michael Fassbender as Magneto and James McAvoy as Professor X. X-Men: First Class is pretty much a friends-to-lovers-to-enemies fever dream with extra found family on the side. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. Then, Days of Future Past I also stand by, but Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix are horrid.

[ectonurites]

Idk why but I sort of just assumed New 52 Teen Titans and all the stuff involving Tim and Cassie, etc, back then had been like. Erased from continuity, never happened, all memories of it gone. Maybe that’s the only way I can reconcile how bonkers (derogatory) everything was and how inconsequential and irrelevant it is now to current continuity (also like. How else am I supposed to make sense of stuff like how apparently Tim’s parents were still alive? But now they aren’t or at least I assume they’re not, bc they haven’t been mentioned or anything in that capacity since?? Like. Does Tim remember his New 52 personality and backstory change outside of like his memories of Young Justice being messed with? When did his personality and backstory actually revert back to Pre-Née 52? I have no idea! They haven’t gone into depth or even mentioned it in a throwaway line afaik!! I need to make it make sense istg)

See, in general I feel you because this whole thing was handled messily, but I have a few things to try to say in response that aren't necessarily in order you brought them up, but, yeah. Also all of this is kinda moot now that after Death Metal everyone does remember everything to some degree, and they even acknowledged the New 52 team during that big splash page of all the Titans teams, so like it's definitely considered stuff that happened to some degree

(Dark Nights: Death Metal - The Last Stories of the DC Universe)

but like. Okay:

Even though a lot of stuff from New 52 Titans doesn't get brought up after, some parts of it do! The most plot-relevant example I can think of is during the Super Sons of Tomorrow story, because basically the whole reason Raven & Gar decide to work with Titans Tomorrow/Savior Tim is because of their connections with modern day Tim from when he led the Teen Titans (in the New 52)

(Super Sons (2017) #11 & #12)

Which like, this was a story in 2018, already a few years into Rebirth. The moment Rebirth happened it's not like every New 52 Teen Titans thing just disappeared, I mean hell the last issue of Teen Titans Vol. 5 actually came out after Tim had 'died' in Rebirth Detective Comics

(Teen Titans Vol. 5 #24)

So it's just this weird thing with a lot of contradictions, right off the bat. In terms of personality basically as soon as Rebirth started they were trying to shift Tim closer back to his previous self, but the first time we actually learn about his history being restored to his old one is during Lonely Place of Living:

(The New Titans (1988) #60, Detective Comics (2016) #965)

Which takes place after he'd been 'killed' and plucked out of time by Mr. Oz. When he'd been taken in the first place, this line always sticks out to me:

(Detective Comics (2016) #940)

Which when trying to make things... make sense in the mess that continuity is, has always felt like at least partially an admission that restoring Tim to who he was required changing so many things because of all the strings attached to the New 52 version of him, it wasn't as simple as just altering his personality. Things like those parents, and any other parts of his history that involve other people, were complicated for the universe to try to 'restore' to their previous state because of how they were altered, so taking Tim (and I imagine those things by extension) 'off the field' was the simpler solution.

While he's 'off the field' with Mr. Oz It's just kinda... the way I rationalize it is that the universe reworked itself as it needed and it just required that extra time with him out of the way to readjust properly, so that when he comes back things have been altered to his original reasons for becoming Robin & everything there, but while his origin was restored other elements of his history since the New 52 had happened stayed more or less the same (bc like other stuff from before the New 52 like Young Justice didn't get restored until later)

In general it's all still very confusing and trying to apply too much logic to it is hard, and ultimately I think they were just trying to retcon what they wanted to and not worry about details from before that they didn't want to... but I kinda imagine it like events from New 52 Teen Titans are still foggily remembered by him, but in probably a weird dissociative way bc there are these differences between Tim now and the Tim that lived through those events. Other people who didn't have quite as big of changes that effected their time as Titans (like Raven and Gar as shown above) might remember things more clearly.

A little off topic but with what you asked about if Tim remembers his memories changing, I feel like he probably wouldn't because there's been no indication of that, but some characters have been shown to be like... aware that things get altered. For example: Miguel, who had been put in some kind of stasis and has clear memories of The New 52 Teen Titans, but also is lowkey aware that things have been altered and rebooted.

(Red Hood and the Outlaws (2016) #30 & #32)

In general: it's confusing! A lot of it I think they just want to shove under the rug until they decide 'oh actually we want to use this little detail again' and that us as fans are probably putting way more thought into it than the people at DC themselves are. I hope any of this made at least a little bit of sense!

[cicelythereaper]

Hello! I was wondering if you had anything on Y Gododdin 😃

hey! fellow gododdin enthusiast! what a delight

i presume this is a request for reading recommendations - i don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, or how accessible these will be, but i’ve tried to cover most bases here. i WISH there were more literary criticism, maybe there is in the welsh-language scholarship and i just haven’t found it? 

it’s entirely possible that i will have missed some obvious things here, i’m mostly sticking to stuff that i personally have read. if something mind-blowing has come out since the last time i did gododdin reading then it’s not here, i’m afraid! 

but enough disclaimers. on to the recs!

text and translation:

for a translation, i cannot recommend enough joseph p. clancy’s translation as found in the triumph tree: scotland’s earliest poetry, 550-1350, ed. t. o. clancy (1998). this is fantastic. it’s poetic, it’s a joy to read, and having used it as part of a deep read last year where i went through the welsh text in detail i am honestly AMAZED regularly at how well clancy handles the many translation issues that arise. it’s loose, and it doesn’t translate every single stanza unfortunately, but for the spirit of the poem you really can’t do better

that said, if you need another translation to check against/to fill in the gaps, i’d recommend kenneth jackson’s the gododdin: the oldest scottish poem (1969). it’s a prose translation, so it’s harder to use in conjunction with the text, but it’s pretty clear and accurate

text-wise... things get complicated. honestly, the best edition is probably still ifor williams’ canu aneirin (1938), in terms of faithfulness to the words on the manuscript page. (i also really enjoy his textual commentary, but it is in modern welsh so not accessible to everyone.) the major problem with it is that you are not going to get the stanzas in the order they appear in the manuscript - he reorders them into groups of perceived variants. this also makes it harder to distinguish between the A-text and the B-text. AND it means that the stanzas are not in the same order as in any of the translations!

if you can get hold of it, i really really think it is worth having daniel huws’ llyfr aneirin: a facsimile (1989). the introduction is SO useful for understanding the manuscript context, and it comes with gwenogvryn evans’ transcription of the book of aneirin, which you can compare with williams’ edition if need be to work out where a stanza actually goes.

there’s a conspectus of editions which i think thomas owen clancy put together but i cannot for the LIFE of me remember where it is - if you think you’ll need it, PM me and i’ll see what i can do

dating, textual criticism and historicity:

t. m. charles-edwards, wales and the britons, 350-1064 (2013), chapter 11 - this is from more of a historical perspective than a strictly linguistic/palaeographical/dating perspective, but it’s a really good general introduction and i definitely recommend starting with it. if you read nothing else, read this. this whole book is a godsend

t. m. charles-edwards, 'the authenticity of the gododdin: an historian's view', in astudiaethau ar yr hengerdd, eds. bromwich and jones (1978), pp. 44-91 - this kind of lays out the standard view which everyone has been deconstructing ever since. we don’t know anything about what’s going on with y gododdin, but at one point we thought we did know something and this was what it looked like

d. n. dumville, 'early welsh poetry: problems of historicity', in early welsh poetry: studies in the book of aneirin, ed. b. f. roberts (1988) - and HERE is the deconstruction! a pretty good overview of the issues with “knowing anything” when it comes to y gododdin

p. sims-williams, 'dating the poems of aneirin and taliesin', zeitschrift für celtische philologie 36 (2016), 163-224 - i don’t have any notes on this and haven’t read it recently, but i remember it being good (it’s sims-williams so of course it is). almost certainly contains linguistics, but is probably also written readably

o. j. padel, 'aneirin and taliesin: sceptical speculations', in beyond the gododdin: dark age scotland in medieval wales, ed. a. woolf (2013), pp. 153-75 - if you can stand linguistics talk, padel does his best to make it understandable here and gives a good overview of the linguistic arguments for and against suggested dates for y gododdin. this whole book is actually very useful

g. r. isaac, 'canu aneirin awdl LI', journal of celtic linguistics 2 (1993), 65-91, AND 'readings in the history and transmission of the gododdin', cambrian medieval celtic studies 37 (1999), 55-78 - DEEP IN THE TEXTUAL CRITICISM. honestly, my poor attention span means i find it hard to pay attention all the way through these two, but if you want a really in-depth look at the possible relationships between the A and B-texts of y gododdin, this is the way to go

historical discussion and background:

charles-edwards in wales and the britons chapter 11 again

j. rowland, 'warfare and horses in the gododdin and the problem of catraeth', cambrian medieval celtic studies 30 (1995), 13-40 - this is a pretty cool look at the role of cavalry in y gododdin and while i don’t agree with all of it, i think it’s really useful reading if you’re going for a historical take on the poem

p. m. dunshea, 'the meaning of catraeth: a revised early context for y gododdin', in beyond the gododdin again, pp. 81-114 - makes some ESSENTIAL points re the question of: is catraeth catterick? moreover, IS CATRAETH A PLACE?

c. cessford, 'northern england and the gododdin poem', northern history 33 (1997), 218-22 - a historical perspective on the poem with some very useful points, comparing the situation as sketched out in y gododdin with what we know of the area at the time

m. wood, 'bernician transitions: place-names and archaeology', in early medieval northumbria: kingdoms and communities, AD 450-1100, eds. petts and turner (2011), pp. 35-70 - a welcome look at the archaeological and place-name evidence for what was going on in bernicia as it changed from a brittonic to a germanic-dominated area. really useful to have in mind both when reading the poem and when reading more literary history

r. collins, 'military communities and transformation of the frontier from the fourth to the sixth centuries', in the same book, pp. 15-34 - pretty fascinating look at the earlier background running up to the time period depicted in y gododdin, and the possibility of continuity between the roman occupation of hadrian’s wall and the post-roman era there. useful social/archaeological perspective!

f. h. clark, 'thinking about western northumbria', in the same book, pp. 113-28 - an early medieval english perspective on the area at the time, useful for comparison and completeness’ sake 

literary discussion:

ifor williams, lectures on early welsh poetry (1944) and the beginnings of welsh poetry, ed. bromwich (1972, 2nd ed. 1980) - THE CLASSICS. an old-fashioned, not to say outdated, viewpoint, but that’s because this is the guy who INVENTED the viewpoint back when it was new! even now there’s a lot of good stuff packed into these and ifor williams’ prose style is a real pleasure to read. not to be missed

a. o. h. jarman, 'the heroic ideal in early welsh poetry', in beiträge zur indogermanistik und keltologie, ed. meid (1967), pp. 193-211 - likewise somewhat old-fashioned now, but lays out the classic viewpoint well and makes some good literary points. it may also be worth reading the introduction to his edition/translation, aneirin: the gododdin (1988). (i don’t recommend using it as an edition because he conflates the A and B texts and renders the text into modern welsh - this means it reads very smoothly but is quite a bit further away from what’s on the manuscript page.) 

h. fulton, 'cultural heroism in the old north of britain: the evidence of aneirin's gododdin', in the epic in history ed. davidson, mukherjee and zlatar (1994), pp. 18-39 - a pretty interesting read, about the mindset expressed in the poetry, its purpose and its construction

this isn’t lit crit but i’m putting in my favourite g. r. isaac quote from his article ‘gweith gwen ystrat and the northern heroic age of the sixth century’, p. 69: ‘Koch writes that the Book of Aneirin’s ‘immediate milieu is… not the Celtic Heroic Age, but the High Middle Ages’, as if the ‘Celtic Heroic Age’ were a period of comparable historical status to the High Middle Ages. This is not the case, however. A ‘heroic age’ cannot be the ‘immediate milieu’ of any literary production, a ‘heroic age’ cannot produce literature, because a ‘heroic age’ is itself produced through literature (taken in the broadest sense). It is a literary product. The Homeric epics are not the product of  a Bronze Age Achaean heroic age, but vice versa. The Irish Ulster Cycle is not the product of an Iron Age, pre-Christian heroic age, but vice versa. And the medieval Welsh poems of ‘Aneirin’ and ‘Taliesin’ (and Triads, sections of the Historia Brittonum, and much else) are not products of a sixth-century North British heroic age, but vice versa.’

honestly there just is not nearly enough lit crit for y gododdin, in english at least, especially to explain cool shit that the welsh text is doing that isn’t visible in the translation, and/or things that could be subversive or ambiguous about it - so, i don’t know what your level of engagement with the medieval welsh text is, but if you’re curious, if you want to know more about what’s going on in a specific stanza (or which stanzas are extended puns), or just which things i’ve been dying to yell about all year, PLEASE message me and I! WILL! YELL! 

articles which are almost certainly good and useful but it’s been too long since i’ve read them to say:

t. o. clancy, 'the kingdoms of the north: poetry, places, politics', in beyond the gododdin again, pp. 153-75

m. haycock, 'early welsh poets look north', likewise in beyond the gododdin, pp. 115-52

FINAL NOTE:

one of the problems with translations is that they give an impression of way more certainty about the meaning of the text... than is actually there. you’re pretty safe with clancy or kenneth jackson, but tread carefully. again, i don’t know your level of engagement with medieval welsh, but if you want to know if there are any major textual issues with a stanza, hmu and i will gladly consult my copious textual notes! but in general, BEWARE of basing anything too heavily on the following groups of stanzas:

A40, A41, B5, B6 (Am drynni drylaw drylenn; Clancy ‘For the feast, most sad, disastrous’)

A42, B25, B35 (Eur ar vur caer; Clancy ‘Gold on fortress wall’)

A48, B3, B24 (Llech leutu tud leudvre; Clancy ‘Standing stone in cleared ground’)

A62, B14, B15, B16, B36 (Angor dewr daen; Clancy ‘Anchor, Deifr-router’)

the Gorchanau if you’re interacting with those, especially the Gwarchan Maeldderw - if anyone tells you they know exactly what is going on in these, do not believe them. isaac has a full translation of the gwarchan maeldderw in cambrian medieval studies 44, and it’s useful, but i’m not by ANY means completely convinced by it, so tread carefully.  

the more stanzas there are in a group of variants (or at least a group that shares lines), the more likely it is that those stanzas are going to be SUPER DUPER TEXTUALLY FUCKED UP, is a pretty good rule of thumb.

[makeyourownmyth]

best seen in 2020.

My usual caveats from previous years are still applicable here: I don’t watch most of the major nominations the years they come out, and I’m usually not much for theaters and/or current TV. However, due to the pandemic, we watched a loooooooot of content. Here’s just a list of movies that I watched or rewatched this year, that were neither terrible, nor great, but I want to make note of:

Toy Story 4, The Brothers Bloom, Happiest Season, The Peanut Butter Falcon, Moana, Mr. Right, Moulin Rouge, Ocean’s Eleven, Spring Breakers, X-Men: Dark Phoenix (this might have been the worst movie I watched this year?), Widows, Gattaca, Black Klansman, Primer, It 2, Shazam (this maybe should have gone on the Honorable Mentions - it was fun), Training Day, Parasite (OK, now I have to update my Honorable Mentions), The Green Book, Strange Days, Elf, Love & Basketball, Above the Rim, Coach Carter.

That being said, there was some bad stuff, and I try not to shit on any artist’s creations too much, because I know no one sets out to make something bad, but these didn’t work for me. 

Anti

Uncut Gems - It’s not that it was BAD, it was just too stressful for me to enjoy.

Brick - It wasn’t even close to enjoyable on a rewatch that I encouraged my partner to take on for the first time. I felt bad. 

Hereditary - Neither a scary movie, nor a good movie.  

The Witch - Same, but maybe better made?

Under The Skin - Jesus, this was terrible. Maybe I’m not artsy enough to get it?

Now, however, let’s get to the good stuff. 

Honorable Mention TV

Avatar - I can’t legitimately put it on the Best Of list, because I’m not done yet, but I’m on Book 3, after finally actually getting started. I think I tried to start this in 2016, and i know all my nerd friends have been yelling at me for a long time because I haven’t gotten to it yet, and as someone who’s almost done, I can say: they were right! It’s great. 

Ozark - S1 was great. It fell off a fucking CLIFF after that. Ignore people who tell you that you HAVE to watch this. They’re wrong. It’s fine. 

The Last Dance - I know the world is obsessed with Michael Jordan, and I’m glad it came out when it did, but really, all it did for me was confirm that he’s an asshole who was very fortunate to play when he did. And also that the Bulls were fucking phenomenal. 

His Dark Materials - Neither as bad as some of my friends think, nor nearly as good as the books (obviously) but also not good enough that I’ve even started S2 yet, so....I guess it’s fine? 

The Mandalorian S2 - I think they know what they’re doing, and it’s super enjoyable, and I loved the ending, but I’m also curious as to where they’re going now. 

Fargo S3 - Given how good the rest of the series is (other than my distaste for S2, dealt with below, and out of step with pop culture) I thought this one was a misstep, 

Orphan Black - I cannot believe how late I was to this, and how good it still was. It really fell apart toward the end, but the acting was incredible, and the fact that they got to tell the story they wanted to was amazing. 

Best TV

7. All the Smoke with Kobe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R3KIyEgCgc) - Maybe it was just his death, but it hits hard, and I miss him. Does this even count as TV? 

6. Looking for Alaska - It felt like gratuitous masochism to watch this and enjoy it, being 20 years older than when I fell for it, and feeling ashamed of the young person I was, but even knowing what was coming, I was weeping when it happened. Even knowing that they were ultimately going on a fruitless search and yelling at the TV while the Colonel and Pudge were searching for “signs” and hating them for it, I remember feeling like everything HAD to happen for a reason when I was this young... So yeah. It’s pure nostalgia for me. I’d be super interesting in hearing how kids responded to it. 

5. Locke and Key - I get that some people feel like they don’t need old shit in a new medium, but for me, I’m always up to try it out. If it’s fun, I’ll stick with it. And this is. It’s fun, it’s got some of the old shit, it’s got some new shit, and it’s a treat to see my favorite comic of the last decade in a new medium. Haters need a new bit. 

Fargo s1 and s4 (I didn’t love S3) - I know that I’m in the minority here, but I think 1 and 4 are the best and 2 was good, and 3 was fine. I literally watched all of this show this year, though, so I didn’t have the same time to digest as others. But I think that’s a benefit in some regards? 

4. Magicians s5 - One of the saddest conversations of the last year to two was when a nerd friend of mine said he didn’t like The Magicians because all of the characters were whiny and self-indulgent. For me, that was almost literally the point: they shoved Q into the corner and told the story of the others (at least one episode quite self-referentially so) and it was so much better for that. I wish it hadn’t ended, but I’m glad they left it where they did, because it was so good.  

3. Devs esp. The beginning of e5 - Jesus. The show of the year? Except for the fact that Watchmen came out at the tail end of last year, and I didn’t have it on my 2019 list? I mean, honestly, is there a show more tailored to me? I’m not gonna get into any spoilers, but it’s a quick watch, and it’s fucking fantastic. Watch it, have your mind blown by the concept, especially in the beginning sequence of E5, and then stick around for the subpar ending where basically all of the threads are resolved in the least good way. 

2. Watchmen - This deserves multiple re-watches and all the praise that people heaped upon it. 

1. The Good Place - I know, objectively, that Watchmen was a better show than The Good Place. But this is my list, and I’ll be damned if anything overtakes my favorite sitcom (maybe of all time?) for best of the year. I know it barely just ended this year, and there’s plenty of acclaim to go around for this show, but honestly, every time I talk to anyone about it, it feels like they kind of laugh it off. This show is not only worth your time, but should almost be considered must-watch material. If more people watched this show, we wouldn’t need the insult “sophomoric” to describe people who’ve just had their minds blown by Philosophy 101, and we’d be better off as a species. 

Honorable Mention Movies

In this order, and you can take the comedies and make them the only honorable mentions, if you’d like to make a nice, even top 10. (Until I saw Tenet the night before I posted this.( (And then I looked back at the playing cards that we use to randomly choose movies and I found that I needed to modify the Honorable Mentions and the Best Of lists.) 

21 and 22 Jump Street - In general, I’m not a fan of comedies. So I’m happy I watched these, thanks to Nathan Zed, and they’re funny. Good work guys. 

Palm Springs - Apparently there’s now backlash against Groundhog Day? I dunno, man, it was fun, and all the actors seemed like they were having a good time, and I was down for it. 

Parasite - I can’t add anything to this that hasn’t already been shouted from the rooftops, so let me just briefly say that I thought it was great, but it didn’t quite make the list of best. The combo of genres was great, the cast was fantastic, but what I loved the most about it was how quiet it was.

Best Movies

10. Blinded by the Light - Way more resonant than I thought it’d be from the previews, and I already thought it was gonna be stellar. I didn’t take into account TIME along with place, and that made a hell of a difference for this movie. 

9. Shoplifters - Yeesh. What a tough watch, but so good, and so necessary. For me, I think we watched it back to back to back with Parasite and I, Tonya, and this one just stood out so much more. The storyline was softer all the way through, but really had gravitas simultaneously. 

8. Tenet - It was fucking fun! I don’t get the hate! I liked it, I’ll like it more next time I see it, and I wish I’d seen it on the big screen, but I’m super glad I could see it on my TV! 

7. I, Tonya - Geez, what a powerhouse of acting. Not only did they get me to feel good about the villain of my childhood, they got me to feel good about Margot Robbie, who I’d only thought of as a hot lady before. Superb acting from everyone else, too, and what a great pick up to be like, yeah, this is the story we’re gonna tell. 

6. I Am Not Your Negro - I avoided watching it for so long because I was already depressed this year, and I didn’t think I needed any more of that, but it turns out I did, and I always do, from Baldwin. He’s a master for a reason. 

5. Hamilton - I know there was some backlash with the time difference, and I’m sure it was better to see it pre-2016 in the theater, where it’s meant to be seen, but I’m not a billionaire New Yorker, and I was plenty happy to see it when and where I could. 

4. Won’t You Be My Neighbor - I mean...what do you think? It’s so much exactly what you’re thinking it is, but then it’s even better, because it’s the real deal, and he was so good, and it’s so pure. Watch it. 

3. Her Smell - Elizabeth Moss has already gotten all the acclaim, but to play this different of a role, in a movie that felt as stressful as Uncut Gems, but pulled off an actual plot so much more successfully? I can’t believe this one didn’t get more pub, but then again, yes I can: it’s a movie about a girl band that rages against the machine, and she’s got severe issues. Small surprise that the people didn’t react well. Seek this one out! 

2. Arrival - Yes, I am going to totally cheat and put a movie that’s appeared on my list (sooooo long ago) as the #2 entry this year. You know why? Cuz fuck 2020, and this is a great movie, and it’s the movie that made me feel second best this year. It’s incredible, and I know people appreciated it in its time, but I feel like they should appreciate it even more. 

1. Moonlight - It’s not a shock, nor am I trying to appease anyone with anything. It’s just that I finally watched it, and it’s the best movie I saw this year. I don’t think I could possibly add anything to the authentic critics who have already heaped praise upon it, but I do have to say that it’s all due, and so much more. The acting obviously stands out, but the direction, from the color palettes, to the choice of when and where (and how) to break it up, are all masterful choices.  

[stranger-who-writes-fiction]

So 5x18...

...Well hot d*mn.

Man when Supergirl fires on all cylinders...HOO BOY.

Case in point: *gestures to all of 5x18*

To be clear: I liked this one.

A WHOLE LOT.

Not that I disliked 5x17, necessarily. It’s just that 5x18 was more... Entertaining? ...I dunno. I dunno how to explain it.

...Okay yes I do and that explanation is: Someone remarked on Kara’s use of language and Kara overcompensated on the ‘NOooOOooOO I’m totally 100% normal!’ AND there was a musical quote AND it was WHILE TEAMING UP WITH ALEX TO FOLLOW A LEAD.

But I’m getting ahead of myself let’s backtrack...

TO THE TOWER! WITH ALEX! NIA! KARA! AND M’GAAAAAANNNNN!!!!!!

June Foray voice: WOULD YOU LIKE TO STAY FOREVER?!?!?!

I know I’m not the first person to make that reference but it’s always fitting and, for real, recurring character status WHEN. (I mean. Obviously I would prefer series regular but that feels like a big ask considering that all future TV production is...uh. Ah. Erm....

...Up in the air. At the moment.)

And then we check in with the Luthors and Non Nocere isn’t working???

I am shocked! Shocked, I say!

And then we’ve got Obsidian doing something ill-advised which is basically the company’s MO at this point but KELLY AND WILLIAM ARE ON THE CASE REGARDLESS.

(So that’s kinda the one thing I’m sad about re: the Crisis reset; Andrea’s character development. But she’s sticking around for next season so I’m not too upset that she remains...kinda...one note for now.)

And THEN the library scene. 

It was so gooooood.

Then Leviathan and okay. Alright. Okay. Huge points in this episode’s favor: Rama Khan feels like a far more significant threat. And I feel like 80% of that is the fact that they just let him wear normal clothes. Thank you, show. Thank. You.

Also the rock effects were way better in this episode because they weren’t footing the bill for a giant crossover episode this time around

I am a little confused, though, by what has and has not happened with regards to Rama Khan on Earth Prime. Did the pre-Crisis stuff...happen? The dialogue...kinda made it hard to decide one way or the other. ‘He hasn’t been seen on this Earth for 100s of years’ but then also, ‘a chilly place you know quite well.’ So...he...did go to the Fortress. And fight Kara? But...all that stuff before Crisis...???

...Not gonna bother with that right now.

POINT IS...Leviathan is finally like...invested in killing Supergirl* and menacing in a very real way which both raises the stakes and makes it personal and that’s way more interesting than ‘nebulous evil organization that must be stopped.’

*I know they kinda sorta already did the whole, ‘let’s kill the Kryptonian!’ and invaded the Fortress but I don’t know what to tell ya, it was just lackluster.

J’ONN AND M’GAAAAAANNNNN

I am firmly in camp: I don’t care if they’re never green again I love seeing them in the super suits with their human faces IT’S GREAT.

Love that Nia’s snoring interrupts the moment.

Also love the deck of Rama Khan playing cards, that must’ve been a fun project for the graphic designers.

Then we’ve got William and Kara at CatCo and it’s baked goods! A hilarious line delivery by Staz! A ridiculous fabrication involving a shy, violent cat!

...Now I want Alex to actually own a shy, violent cat!

“Cats love me, for some reason.” “Of course they do.”

Side note: Love Kara’s blazer.

And then it’s ALIEEEEEENS TO THE RESCUE!

WHAT A TEAM UP, FOLKS.

We love to see it.

The interrogation scene is good n’ tense and ramps up to a very impressive showdown in the DEO (but BEFORE the sparks really start flying we get that rad shot of Kara leaping through the window and doing the superhero landing and it’s just

Perfection.)

Also perfect? Lex playing a game of transmatter pickle with the prisoners.

Then we jump back to the DEO where things are not going well!

Like, really really bad! 

But J’onn and M’gann save the day! If not the building!

RIP DEO. 2016-2020

Obituary: The DEO headquarters is survived by its elder sibling, the DEO desert base.

Look none of the favs work there anymore save for Kara and Brainy and they’re both gonna be better off working freelance for J’onn but I do expect Brainy to at least pick up some additional cash by working as a Lyft driver next season.

Me, watching the characters struggle to make it in the gig economy: I feel so seen.

The final portion of the episode is just ALL ACTING and I must say...good stuff.

Like. This cast, man. They take the plot points I’ve been ‘meh’ about all season and they turn in some stellar performances and suddenly I’m like STANDING OVATION, CAN’T WAIT TO SEE WHERE THIS GOES.

Also, reason #342 I love Jon Cryer’s Lex: that scene with Lena.

Terrifying.

Full disclosure: I went in to this episode fully prepared to be really annoyed with whatever was going to happen with Lena and I still don’t...love the trajectory of this season, being so tied up in her personal drama but. 

But.

Katie McGrath’s performance...went an awful long way here. In making this...not as bad as it could have been.

Like tearfully admitting she was hurt? And that hurt was the basis of all the nonsense she pulled? Finally owning up to the fact that this was never truly about the greater good but that it was all rooted in some personal issues and OUTRIGHT STATING SHE WAS BEHAVING LIKE A VILLAIN????

I am. Extremely impressed.

EVEN MORE IMPRESSIVE THOUGH: Kara remaining distant both physically and emotionally throughout that scene! Not in like, a cold uncaring way, but in a, ‘I have emotions and I have a right to feel them and set boundaries in regards to my trusting you right now given all that has transpired’ kind of way.

GOOD. YES. GOOD.

(Lex’s outburst has that kind of same Nice Guy undertone--albeit more pronounced and rage-y--as Lena’s in the Fortress. Like, ‘I supported you and you still rejected my plot to take over the world’ and ‘I was kind to you and you still messed up my mind control’ which...I dunno I might just be digging in too deep here in order to further justify the character turn but I think Cryer’s performance regardless is a really sobering wake up call for Lena, different than Lex stuff we’ve seen before. It’s close and intense and uncomfortable in a way that really sells the motivation.)

“You’re a monster...but that doesn’t mean I have to be one too.”

Wow. Might be...the first time I’ve liked Lena all season.

...whispers: might be the first time I’ve liked her ever at all

For real: credit where it’s due, that was an excellent line read.

*insert applause here*

CUT TO ADORABLE J’ONN AND M’GANN MOMENT 

D’aaaawwwwwwwwww

But, look, it’s a little undermined by the fact that they both gotta try and embrace in those bulky super suits, I’m sorry, it’s true

...Maybe it’s more endearing that way?

HEY remember how I foolishly assumed that the now-unemployed Alex would simply continue to work with J’onn in an investigative capacity and, ya know, NOT jump straight back into costumed badassery? 

HA. HAHA HAHAAAA.

Those leaked set photos make sense now.

OH NO, WILLIAM!

Real glad Staz confirmed he’s returning. Otherwise I would not be able to DEAL WITH THE STRESS.

I already talked a little bit about the loft scene but some additional points! Beautiful lighting. Wonderful score. Excellent performances all around.

A truly great end to a truly great episode.

Like, it makes me retroactively sad, that we’re only getting 5x19, as opposed to 5x19 and 5x20 because I wish that the crew/writers/actors had a little more space to let all of this good work they’ve done settle and breathe. 

(But also, it was good that they stopped production, from a safety standpoint, so. Can’t be too upset.)

And, regardless of how the next episode goes down (b/c I’m gonna be real, SG always does really great set-ups for their season finales and then kinda...rushes to the finish line and that can only be further exacerbated in this particular case) I’m just really impressed with this effort here.  

...but also LET’S TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO MAKE SOME WILD GUESSES. Specifically, what is Alex’s vigilante name gonna be??? 

...

Alright I generally try to avoid addressing specific fandom complaints in these things b/c I generally try to avoid the fandom itself but of course some stuff has already leaked through all of my blocks/muting so:

‘Lena didn’t apologize!’ The words ‘I’m sorry’ were not said, sure, but 1.) season’s not over and 2.) for Lena, admitting she was wrong is huge. HUUUUUUUGE. It’s solid character growth and I really wish various subsets of fandom would recognize that it’s not fun, when fans hold on to negative stuff from characters’ past and refuse to acknowledge that the characters have changed.

‘Brainy should have seen this coming!’ This one is kind of more down to personal preference I guess but I feel like they’ve established that Brainy’s got a bit of a blindspot due to his feelings about his friends, so I don’t take this as a knock against his intelligence so much as him being stretched fairly thin because he’s playing all sides, and worried about the people he loves. YMMV, though. 

All the ‘fix-it’ stuff re: the last scene, by making Kara immediately forgive Lena. Lose me with that nonsense, bleh. 

[exosmuttytalk]

Exo’s DO MV hairstyle rating: a comprehensive list

What is Love, 2012. 

Probably the longuest DO’s hair ever been. Surprisingly, I don’t mind it. For some reason, the demarcation between the super long and super short hairs isn’t that stark. I like that. It looks super dated, tho. 

Final rating: 5/10 KS

History, 2012. 

A different version of the previous hairstyle but leaving the waves aside. I like it because it seems more achievable in his (probably) pin straight hair. Looks soft and fluffy :D

Final rating: 6/10 KS

Mama, 2012

Eh, no. He looks like a fluffy rhyno. What are those spikes on the sideburns? I bet all that fringe hair without gel to hold it flings straight into his eyes. 

Final rating: 2/10 KS

Wolf, 2013

Let’s agree that everybody looked horrendous in Wolf. Like ma boy here who could be strutting the best catwalks in Syberia but the moment he stopped walking he’d freeze to death because he’s not wearing a coat. He looks like a fluffy mushroom and I wouldn’t eat one of those.

Final rating: 0/10 KS (Shame)

Growl, 2013

This must have been the “wildest” color KS’s ever wore, right? I don’t really know about this one. I can appreciate the attempt to change the color, as it’s very obvious he’s not one to experiment much with that sort of stuff. So A for effort. Now, that fringe is all messed up. When his hair falls down naturally without being gelled up he probably has strands sticking out in different directions and all different lengths. 

Also, the more I stare at this picture, the more I can sense Uncanny Valley creeping from my toes up and I don’t like that. 

Final rating: 3/10 KS

Miracles in December, 2013

Here KS has what in my language is called a bowl cut. I don’t even know if that’s the term in English and I don’t really feel like looking it up. 

Either way, from what I’ve seen in the Korean media I’ve had access to is that this hairstyle seems to be super common among teens and young adults. That surprised me because where I am it’s a hairstyle reserved to little kids. 

I understand the appeal, tho. He looks soft and cuddly despite having been ghosted. He’s not menacing (because you can’t see his brows). Makes you want to give him hot cocoa and bundle him up inside a big, soft, fluffy white blanket.

Final Rating: 8/10 KS

Overdose, 2014

So baaaad... I mean so gooooooooood. 

I really like this one. It’s longer, but it’s longer in an unniform manner. Also, this looks like he’s woken up in the morning with each strand of hair in a different possition. He’s then washed his face and making sure he’s wetting his hair as well. He’s us’ed a comb to make a very precise parting but then hasn’t combed through the rest of the hair, so now that’s getting dry, all the strands are starting to stick up again. 

That’s very relatable.

Final rating: 8/10 KS

Call me Baby, 2015

This is one of KS’s best looks and I will die on this hill. 

It’s rather short. Blunt. Structured. Has a little flair but the flair is not too long that it sticks into his eyes. The color is natural and dark but has subtle golden and redish highlights. Looks very effortless. NOICE.

Also, filled in, strong eyebrows.

Final rating: 9.5/10 KS (Because there’s always room for improvement)

Love me Right, 2015

Ohh, yes. This is the second main contender to the first position, Again, to me this looks effortless, which is exactly the type of lifestyle I can see KS having. Chill, easy, no fuss, manageable. I woke up like this and I think I last brushed my hair two days ago. A natural man.

I love the styling too.

Bonus Chanyeol happily vibing in the brackground.

Final rating: 9,5/10 KS 

Sing for you, 2015

KS is barely visible in this MV. You know he’s there; you can feel him looming ominously around the borders of every scene. You can hear his voice. But you can’t really see him. The natural darkness of a B&W video shot in a supposed snowstorm grants a shadow for him to disguise himself into. 

That’s the reason why I’ve had to take those screenshots directly on the mv and why we can barely see his hair. But we can imagine. Looks shot and functional. Not so short and functional as it’s military counterpart. Seems like it would be nice to stroke it. It’s not flashy or attention grabbing. Discreet, but with a little room to play, represented as the spikiness of the fringe area. 

Imma give this one a lower rating because I feel there’s another hairstyle that unites all those characteristics and that both KS and I like better.

Final rating: 8/10 KS

Lucky one, 2016

This is just a shorter version of the Sing for you supposed hairstyle. It’s alright. Although it’s a little bit lazy, I feel it fits the aesthetic of the video quite well. Clean and neat. I like how his perplexed expression during the beginning of this mirrors my own façade so well every time I rewatch this MV.

Final rating: 7/10 KS

Monster, 2016

The styling of the hair may be the exact same as in Lucky One, but I don’t really care. My eyes dart directly to the bruise on his cheeks and the scar on his eyebrow. The holes and burns on his clothes. There’s something really special in a rugged man for me. 

Final rating: 8.5/10 KS

Lotto, 2016

This is a problem, because there’s two main stylings of which I hate the first one and really like the second one. In the first one, they obviously wanted him to look like he actually jumps into the cages with the roosters and physically trains them on fight. The second one looks pretty standard, soft and floofy. It’s shiny too and it looks healthy. Also I like the pirate like clothes styling here.

I’m conflicted.

Final rating: 4/10 KS

Dancing King, 2016

He doesn’t have a lot of screen time in this MV. Most of the time, he’s either on rehearsals or performing. He wears a lot of caps. I never really understand the purpose of a cap if you’re not out in the sun (or scaping fans and papparazzi). Seems easy to knock off accidentally, a gust of wind could suddenly come by and snatch it off your head. You are going to make it all sweaty because all that dancing and then you’re gonna have to stick it into the washing machine. Can you put a cap on the washing machine? Does it lose its shape or smth?

I digress. The cap is, despite all the previous reticence, one of the few accessories he seems to wear irl. So Imma going to give him a good rating for realism and for giving us a little more BTS content. 

Final rating: 7/10 KS

Coming over, 2016

It was impossible to find still of the video but he wore the same styling as in this card, We have to set things straight. 2016 was a hell of a year. They released six different MVs, one of them a collaboration and one of them in japanese. There’s just not enough time for drastic hair changes. Hair doesn’t grow that fast. And it’s easier to leave the more lowkey members in a simple style so you have more time for the not that lowkey members. I get it. Imma a bit bored but I get it.

Final rating: 6.5/10 KS

Kokobop, 2017

Yeeeeees, the change we’d all been waiting for. Aaaaand I hate it. I dislike that his hair matches his jacket. I dislike the fact that even his eyebrows look color coordinated. If it wasn’t for the blue shirt, he’d look as if he had been passed through a sepia filter. Not into it.

Final rating: 3.5/10 KS.

Power, 2017

I love this whole look. Almost everybody’s looks, in fact. It seems like it was a very fun video shooting. We hadn’t seen a KS smile since love me right. He looks so young and playful, so boyish. 

There’s not much to say about the hair. It’s all carelessly hidden under a crownless cap? and some other accessories, but we can appreciate he’s gone back to his natural color. Praise the stylist noonas. 

Final rating: 7.5/10

Universe, 2017

Ahhh, my white whale in the shape of a head. You were short and fleeting, but at least there’s a MV and a whole film to remember you. 

I love bald KS. I definitely don’t appreciate Eggsoo, but what’s not to love about a shaved head? Especially, his bald head. He’s extremelly symmetric and looks so uniform all around. It probably feels like a stroking a very dense but soft brush. He’s said himself he like this hairstyle. It’s strong. Durable. Reliable. Pragmatic. Still, soft, aesthetically pleasing. All KS really is. 

I also love the lighting and the clothe styling in this MV, it’s like a honey and caramel wet dream.

Final rating: 9,5/10 KS

Electric Kiss, 2018

There’s not much to say about this either because it’s not easily visible. Looke like he has his sides shaven. The top is definitely longer but not a lot. Unceremoniously passes.

Final rating: 6/10 KS

Tempo, 2018

I think he looks specially good in tempo. Boyish but not too much. Longer hair, which is a change. The worst part is that he doesn’t have a lot of parts and even less screen time. I love how his lipstick matches the background.

Final rating: 7.5/10 KS

Love Shot, 2018

I love this. Men driving are a kink for me. Black hair, yes. Aviator jacket, yes. Strands of hair loosely framing your face, yes. You usual stoic expression, yes.

Final rating: 7.5/10

His final MV pre-enlistment was a success. Let’s hope for more good looks when he returns.

[mytearsrricochet]

color icon tutorial

ok i’m not super great at making icons but an anon requested a tutorial for my icons so i will post my process! it’s good for beginners i think (even tho i have been making these icons this way since 2016 lol) 

you’ll need:

Photoshop CS5 or higher (I have CS5 which is quite old, I know, but I pirated it many years ago oops)

relatively hq pics to make icons out of

a psd (if you need some, tumblr.com/tagged/psd is what i periodically check for some). 

an action (preferably sharpening action, since that is what i use)

a texture if you want

you, yourself, and you, and i guess this tutorial

i’m going to be making this as a beginner’s tutorial so it’s gonna go about as in-depth as  one can be! it’s gonna include a lot so feel free to skip a lot of it if you are already pretty well-versed in photoshop or icon-making.

ITS SO LONG IM SO SORRY IT IS SO VERY IN-DEPTH I’VE EXPLAINED EVERY POSSIBLE THING I COULD’VE

but also if you have any questions at all, please let me know. i love teaching people stuff.

example of the icons that i make:

Hi hello welcome

Ok, so first open up Photoshop. I am using CS5.

You will need hq pics of whatever you plan to icon. I do 99% Taylor Swift, so I use taylorpictures.net for all my icon needs. Make sure they are of semi-decent quality, they don’t have to be amazing since we will be shrinking them down to a very small size so much of the quality is gonna disappear anyway but like, make sure you can at least tell the subject from the background distinctly (you’ll see why later).

This is the picture I am using for this tutorial (and will post icons separately):

Open this in ps (File > Open > the picture)

Ok so now it’s the actual tutorial lol

1. Crop the image 

We are not going to crop it to 100x100! Select the Crop tool and set the dimensions to 300 px x 300 px--MAKE SURE THAT YOU TYPE IN PX AFTER YOU TYPE IN 300, OR ELSE IT WILL CONVERT TO CM AND THAT WILL NOT WORK FOR THIS!

Next, crop the picture you want as much as you want--as long as you get what you want in the icon. For these kinds of icons, you just want to focus on one item--like Taylor, for example--instead of multiple (not Taylor and her backup dancers since this isn’t what my icons look like and you won’t be able to do that very well on a beginner level). Crop that to a 300x300 px size and click the check mark on the top bar to finalize it. 

If your pic is hq enough--meaning a larger picture--it will probably look super small. That’s ok, it’s just proportional to the old picture. Go to the right side bar and select the Navigation tool. 

If that tool isn’t there, you will just have to go to Window and select Navigator, and it will bring that up for you. 

See where it says 100% in the picture right there? It will likely say something like 25% or whatever if you just cropped it, so change it to 100% which will bring it to full size.

Cool! now it should look like this:

2. Use the Quick Selection Tool 

Go to the left sidebar on Photoshop. Depending on which PS you have, it might look different. This is what mine looks like. Regardless, the icon should look relatively the same I believe across all Photoshop versions. If it’s not there, you might want to left click and hold down on some of the icons and see if it is an alternative option (it should be there already--but it is grouped with the Magic Wand Tool just in case).

This tool has three options in the top bar: free select, add, and subtract. Start with the middle option: add.

This will allow you to choose which parts of the picture you want to select to cut out for your icon. You can change the selection brush size, but I always keep it at 3px because it keeps it really precise.

Drag your mouse over the area of the image that you want included in your icon. This tool will automatically choose parts of the image that are similar--for example, Taylor’s blonde hair will like all be selected around the same time, but the pink/blue background will not be, since it can tell that those are starkly different colors and thus two different objects in the picture. It should have a crawling ants moving line around the areas of the picture you want to select. If you go outside of what you want included in your icon, that’s ok! That’s why the subtract option is there. Just select that--to the right of the Add option--and go over what you do NOT want in your icon to get rid of it using the Subtract tool. You might have to go back and forth between those tools in order to get exactly what you want in the final product.

I can’t show you my final outline for Quick Selection since it goes away when I screenshot, but after you’re sure you got what you want in your moving ants line, it’s time to finalize it.

Remember, this tool effectively cuts out the selected portion of the picture from its background.

3. Refine Edge

On the top bar, click the big rectangle button that says Refine Edge. It will bring up a window that looks sort of like this, but I have settings adjusted the way I like:

You can change these settings any way you’d like, but I generally stick with this. It’s also okay to mess around with them and see how you feel. If you don’t want to do that, you can just use my settings and edit anything you don’t like later.

Click OK to cut.

This has pretty much removed the background from the picture and only left what we cut out and a transparent background (hence the checkered background--that is space that doesn’t actually exist). You can also see some shadow from the background around her arms and hair, which we can delete out later very easily. That is a result of the settings from Refine Edge, which is why some people choose to lower the Feather bar so that it doesn’t include as much shadow--which is good for many pictures since a lot of these are straight cuts, but this can occasionally cut out part of the icon you want to keep or make it look weird since you want just a little space to mess up when it comes to the Quick Selection Tool.

Bonus step if you want a selective colored icon:

Some people like really vibrant icons that include re-coloring. I’m not very good at it, but what I do (and it sometimes turns out well--this is typically the way people do it, though they are less sloppy than I am) is select a color from the Swatches at the right that is similar to the one that they want to paint over. For example, if I wanted to make Taylor’s hair more yellow/gold and vibrant, I will choose a yellow. Select the Paintbrush tool. On the top bar, the Opacity will likely be set to 100%, which will basically color right over the picture and look weird. Set the opacity to something very light--mine is 20%--and paint over the part that you want to color. Make sure you do this in one stroke--if you paint over her hair with 20% opacity once, let go of the mouse, then go over it again, it’s gonna start building up and becoming more opaque!

You can also completely recolor a picture this way, like if you wanted Taylor to have entirely pink hair, you can use this same method but choose the pink you want instead of a similar yellow. This can be very difficult and tedious, so I don’t typically selective color my icons, though occasionally I do because I love those icons with obnoxiously vibrant colors.

4. Open texture/create new background.

Ok, so I do both of these things depending on the background I want. I have some textures saved such as this that I use for icons:

I didn’t make it--it’s pre-made by another artist on tumblr from whom I downloaded their texture pack. You can make backgrounds like these too, but I’m not very good at them. 

SO you can either File > Open one of these pre-made backgrounds/textures, or you can make your own.

In order to do that, you can do File > New and change the settings to width: 100 pixels and height: 100 pixels. Under Background Contents, choose White. That’s very important! You don’t want transparent, it doesn’t help us. That brings up a new window on Photoshop next to the picture we’ve just cut out, just a small white square. You can paint that whatever color you’d like. Use the Paint Bucket tool and choose a color from the Swatches section on the right. This will make the background completely one color. However, if you want a gradient, you can do this several ways, but I do it like this: 

Click that, go to Gradient, and mess around with the Gradient options and see how you like the background. Here’s one I made, for example:

Boom! Background for icon. I will use this since I made it for this tutorial so yeah it might not look amazing but here we are.

IF YOU USED THE TEXTURE I JUST POSTED OR YOU KNOW THE TEXTURE YOU ARE USING IS NOT 100x100--THE ONE I POSTED BUT DID NOT MAKE IS 200x200--THEN YOU NEED TO RESIZE IT TO 100x100.

You can do this by going to Image > Image Size and changing the 200 pixels x 200 pixels (or whatever is there) to 100 x 100.

5. Duplicate layer

Now it is time to combine these two images we’ve created. Go back to the original picture we worked on--mine is Taylor at the BBMAs--and go to the right sidebar. You should have two copies of this image now: Background and Background Copy. Background Copy is the cut out picture we are using for the icon. Right click on Background Copy and select Duplicate Layer...

This will bring up a window that asks what you wanna do with this layer. 

Select the dropdown under Destination. Currently, the Document selected is the image we are already on (my Taylor pic was saved under 056.jpg) but we want to click the dropdown and select the pic that we are using for the background. In my case, it’s titled Untitled-1 since I didn’t change the name. Yours probably is too. Select whatever your background image is saved as and click OK.

Now go to the background image or texture that you just selected--your cutout should be there, but you can probably juuuust barely see it! That’s because your picture is about 3 times bigger than your background.

6. Resize layer

Use the Select tool--the very top icon on the left sidebar--and make sure Show Transform Controls is selected on the top bar. If it’s not, you’ll know--because you won’t be able to resize the image.

The square you are seeing (that isn’t the picture) is the layer we just duplicated onto the background, aka the icon. You’ll want to hold Shift and select the bottom right part of the image to resize to whatever you would like visible in the icon--it could be the entirety of the picture we cut out, or just part of it, if you realize you like how only part of it looks. Either way, you need to hold Shift while you do this, or else the image will NOT stay proportional, and it’ll look all wonky. Hold Shift the entire time you are resizing. This is what mine looks like:

You can see I both resized it and moved it a little to the right--you can use the Select tool to move it, but that might move it way too much since it does it incrementally, you can just use the arrows on your keyboard and move it by pixels which takes longer but is way more precise.

You can still see the shadows from the background on the icon, so select the Eraser tool (if the shadows bother you or you don’t like how it looks) and zoom waaay in. You want to be careful with the Eraser tool! (Also make sure Background Copy is still selected so you don’t accidentally erase the background. If you just have Background Copy selected while you erase, it will only erase whatever is part of that layer, it won’t bother the background).

While zoomed in, erase the pixels that are obviously discolored from the rest of the image. You can zoom in and out to check how you like it as it progresses. 

Here is mine after I used the eraser tool on any parts of the image I thought were bad! It should lay on the background naturally.

Now that we’ve figured that out...

7. Sharpen/action

Now is the time to apply an action! Please sharpen your icons. You want them to look good on your blog or others blogs, and in order to do that, you need to sharpen them.

If you already have actions uploaded, cool! If you don’t know how, well, I sure am going very in-depth here so you’re in luck. 

Download an action from any photoshop resource (or tumblr.com/tagged/photoshop-action is where I look occasionally). You will have to load them onto your Photoshop now. Click the button that looks like a movie Play icon on the right sidebar. This will bring up the Action list. Photoshop likely has pre-made actions for you, but we don’t use those because I never taught myself how to use those so maybe you can use them, I don’t know. I just use ones I download from Tumblr.

Click that little dropdown menu and click Load Actions...

This should bring up a file opener and you can select the action that you downloaded for this icon. It will download it into Photoshop and will now always be there--you don’t have to load actions every single time you want to use them. If you load them once, they should be there for the rest of forever.

Scroll down to find that action and select it. Now, make sure you still have Background Copy selected. I don’t care about applying an action to the background, just the copy,  which is still our image that we cut out. Click the Play button on the Action list--pictured above on the very bottom of the screenshot, next to the Circle and the Folder icon. This will apply the action to the background copy. (Hint: if the Play button isn’t available, it’s probably because your action is in a folder. Click the dropdown of the folder and click the first thing under it--that should be the action and it will apply it).

There it is with the action applied! It’s muuuuch sharper--perhaps a little too sharp, but that’s ok, it won’t look bad on people’s blogs.

8. Add a PSD

To apply a PSD, File > Open and choose the PSD you want to use. I listed above where I find most of my PSDs, just download one you like. You can choose 100 different ones and try it out if you want. I use the same one for everything, by @toxicpsds (I believe it’s #6). This should open a third window with the PSD over a sample image (thanks to the artist!). You just have to select the PSD layer--not the image with it--and Duplicate Layer and put it on the image that we have produced thus far. It is the same process as when we took our cutout and put it on the background. (The PSD is probably under a group--mine says Group 1--so just select the group in its entirety--shift-click it if you need to).

You can tell the background is also lighter. If you don’t want the color of the background affected by the PSD, select Background Copy and the PSD together, right click on one of them, and select Merge Layers. This will put the cutout and the PSD in the same layer, which should take the PSD off of the background and revert it back to the color we had before. However, I really like what the PSD did to the background, so I will keep it this way.

I am finished now with my icon! 

9. Save it for Web 

To save the icon to be able to post on Tumblr, go to File > Save for Web & Devices, which will bring up a window like this. It might look a little different since I have my settings a certain way, but whatever.

(Sorry this looks weird here, it’s just what happens when I screenshot. I’m not a tech wizard).

Your pre-saved things might look different, but make sure you are saving a a PNG-24 for the best quality. Just make your settings look like this, basically, then click Save.

There she is! All done!

If you have any questions, let me know! I tried to be really specific, but I’m not sure what level people are on Photoshop (probably better than I am) so just ask if I need to clarify anything!

[gendercensus]

A survey on the prevalence and pronunciation of the title Mx

I’ve run two surveys that focused on Mx in the past. One was in 2014 and had 118 responses, and the other was in 2016 and had 505 responses.

This one ran from 5th until 19th January 2019, and there were 3,204 responses, of which 3,179 were usable, meaning I deleted 25 responses that were abusive or obviously duplicates. Of the 3,179 that were usable, 579 were in the UK. (I single out the UK here because I’m in the UK and I’m particularly interested in collecting UK-specific data.)

The survey was promoted on Tumblr, Twitter, Mastodon, and /r/samplesize on Reddit. The promotional text that I wrote didn’t mention the title Mx at all, in an attempt to get more diverse points of view into the results.

Ultimately my goal was to find out how people are pronouncing Mx these days. I ran the first Mx pronunciation survey in 2014 because I kept seeing people condemning Mx on the basis of not knowing how to pronounce it, so I thought information about how it is most commonly pronounced might help. I’m curious to see if over time people are asking that question less and whether one pronunciation is becoming more popular than others.

Plus I figured it might be interesting to find out a bunch of other stuff along the way while I’m there quizzing you all anyway, so I collected information about

where people were raised and with which first spoken languages (so that people can compare the responses to all the other questions to this information and find out, for example, how Mx is pronounced in Australia or how often it’s on forms in the US vs. the UK)

gender

whether Mx is your title or you’ve just heard of it

how often you see Mx on forms

whether you think it’s gender-inclusive (anyone can use it) or gender-exclusive (nonbinary-specific title)

You can see the spreadsheet of responses and the associated tables and graphs here.

~

FAMILIARITY WITH MX

Here’s the ten countries whose participants are most familiar with Mx:

United Kingdom: 85.5%

France: 71.7% *

Australia: 71.6%

Finland: 70.4% *

Germany: 66.4%

United States: 65.9%

Ireland {Republic}: 65.5% *

Sweden: 61.8% *

Canada: 60.9%

Netherlands: 40.8% *

All countries had at least 27 responses. Countries with less than 100 responses are marked with an asterisk (*).

So at first I was like, “whaaaat, how is France more familiar with Mx than the US, even though the main language of France isn’t even English?” But France had only 53 respondents, compared to over 1,500 from the US, so I imagine there is some bias involved. People filling in the survey will notice that a lot of the questions are about Mx, and when at the end of the survey they’re prompted to share the survey URL they are more likely to do so if their title is Mx or they have friends whose titles are Mx.

So then I moved onto which participants had seen Mx on forms, and which countries they were from. Here’s the top 10 for “participants have seen Mx on English forms in the wild”:

United Kingdom: 36.7%

Ireland {Republic}: 21.7% *

Netherlands: 20.0% *

Canada: 18.0%

Australia: 17.0%

United States: 15.4%

Germany: 10.6%

Finland: 9.5% *

France: 7.3% *

Sweden: 4.5% *

Again, the asterisk (*) specifies that a country had under 100 respondents.

Someone from Australia said in the feedback box that Mx is on every government form, which I thought was excellent! It may not be surprising, since they were the first country to grant a passport with an X gender marker on it to someone who couldn’t be categorised as M or F, way back in 2011.

~

PRONUNCIATION

I guess the thing you’re most interested in here is the way most people pronounce it, right? If you answered an earlier question by saying that you had heard of Mx, this question asked: “How do you personally pronounce Mx when you're speaking English?”

For this question it was possible to select multiple answers, and there was an “other” textbox. None of the “others” got more entries than the least chosen pre-written option (Mixture, 4, or 0.2%).

Mix: 25.5% (573 people)

Məx, with a schwa (ə, toneless vowel): 9.5%

I don't know: 8.0%

Em Ecks, spelling out M-X: 3.9%

Mux: 2.7%

Mex: 2.3%

Mixter: 1.1%

Mixture: 0.2%

In the UK the pronunciation varied from this significantly - Məx (the schwa option) was in the lead with 41%, though this percentage is lower than both previous surveys.

The spreadsheet goes into more detail on pronunciation, including chart for pronunciation in the 10 most popular first spoken languages, but to summarise: In the US go with Mix, and in the UK go with Məx (with a schwa).

This is the biggest survey I’ve seen on the pronunciation of Mx in the UK at least, with 506 participants in the UK taking part who had heard of the title, so this is probably the best we have to go on right now.

~

MX AND GENDER

I did ask about gender in this survey, in quite a roundabout way. I wanted to group people into roughly three groups, while also acknowledging that gender is ridiculous and a lot of people who’d be categorised as cis and binary wouldn’t necessarily feel 100% their gender all the time.

Which of these statements is most true for you?

I'm a man/boy pretty much all the time

I'm a woman/girl pretty much all the time

Neither of the above options fully describes me

It was possible to check more than one box for this question, and several people did.

I then made a few comparisons between gender and other answers.

So we have some obvious details first. For example, of the people who said their title is always Mx, most people checked the “neither of the above” option (89%). And then there were more interesting details, such as that women and girls were significantly more likely than men and boys to use Mx for themselves “sometimes”. Could this be related to a few comments entered into the feedback box expressing discomfort with Mx because it sounds too much like Miss?

I learned that people who checked the “neither of the above” option for gender were the gender group most likely to have heard of Mx at 94%, and men/boys were least likely. Of the people who had not heard of Mx, men and boys made up over half. I’d love to suggest that men and boys are least likely to have heard of Mx in part because their privilege permits more obliviosity, but that would be pure speculation and possibly impure judgemental attitude and nothing more.

~

INCLUSIVE VS. EXCLUSIVE

I asked participants whether they thought Mx was gender-inclusive (anyone of any gender can claim it) or gender-exclusive (generally used when addressing or referring to someone of a particular gender, denoting that gender).

Do you consider Mx to be a title that is gender-inclusive or gender-exclusive, generally speaking?

Gender-inclusive - anyone of any gender can claim it for themselves

Gender-exclusive - it's broadly a title for nonbinary people, in the same way that Mr is broadly a title for men and masculine people and Ms is a title for women and feminine people

I don't know

People whose titles were not Mx considered it to be a nonbinary title by a wide margin, but people whose titles were Mx considered it to be inclusive. This is interesting compared to several of the comments written into the feedback box, which I would paraphrase and roughly generalise into the following:

I’m cisgender and binary and I would really like to have a title that doesn’t express a gender, but I’m scared that it’s a nonbinary title and I don’t want to take it away from nonbinary people.

I’m nonbinary and my title is Mx and I wish some binary people would start using it because I would really like to be able to have a title that doesn’t cause dysphoria but also doesn’t out me as nonbinary.

That’s going entirely on what was typed into the feedback box, of course. There were many other diverse points of view, this was just a pattern that I saw while browsing. It’s possible that other comments were entered elsewhere in the form that I didn’t pick up on, too.

It might be interesting to note that of the people who only said they were men/boys, 14% said their title was sometimes or always Mx. For women/girls it’s 15%. Because of other biases I’ve mentioned above this is probably not representative of the general public, but it shows that binary people are using Mx for themselves in a gender-inclusive way, and over half of people who claim Mx think of it as an inclusive title, the most popular combination on this board:

When you split the inclusive/exclusive vote by nonbinary/binary participants instead of people claiming Mx, the results are much closer:

But again, nonbinary people are more likely to see the title as inclusive and less likely to see it as exclusive.

~

NOTES

In most surveys I usually just ask whether or not someone lives in the UK, but this time I tried asking which country people lived in as a sort of experiment. I’m interested in collecting country-specific data for the much bigger annual survey, and I wanted to see how things might work out on a larger scale.

My hope was that enthusiastic people in other countries might be able to use the data specifically about their own country for their own cunning ends.

What I found was that lots of people said “I actually live in [location] but it wasn’t on the list” when [location] was a territory of another country that is probably culturally and linguistically very different from the governing nation. There were also a lot of people who complained about having to scroll too much to find their country (and language) on the list, so I’m sure there were many people who started to fill in the survey but then gave up and left no feedback.

The most popular country by a long way was the US with 49.6% of responses (1,567), and after that the number of people per country dwindled fast. Number 10 on the list, Finland, had only 27 responses (0.8%).

I think I will omit this question in the annual survey, and stick to “UK or not UK?”

~

CONCLUSION

Mx is pronounced Mix or Məx, with a schwa.

More nonbinary people use it than men or women, but there are binary men and women using Mx in a gender-inclusive way and most people whose titles are Mx are pretty okay with that actually.

The UK are totally winning at adoption of and familiarity with Mx, followed by (eyeballing it) Australia and the Republic of Ireland.

Nonbinary people and people whose title is Mx are both more likely to consider the title to be gender-inclusive, open to anyone who wants to use it regardless of gender identity.

~

CLOSING COMMENTS

Thank you everyone! Thank you for your honest and open answers, thank you for the interesting and helpful feedback comments (shoutout to the sweethearts who commented just to remind me to take regular breaks and to thank me for my hard work, ilu), and thank you for helping to boost the signal and get as many eyes on the survey form as possible. Without you, my survey and spreadsheet obsession would be 95.36% more boring. <3

So, this was kind of a warm-up. The past few weeks have been intense, and more intensity is coming, but I feel a bit more prepared for starting the 2019 survey. Hopefully I’ll be able to get started in a few weeks. Stay tuned...

[fatstinkynuts]

NOW YOU ANSWER ALL OF THEM

aaaaaaaaAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaA I had to draft this last night drunk off my ass lmoa

A movie you’ve seen most times in cinema.I saw Godzila KOTM twice like a responsible adult.

Your most rewatched movie.

I’ve watched John Carpenter’s The Thing once a year since I saw 7, plus a few showings to friends, so that’s roughly 36 times.

A movie you quote on a daily basis.

Kung Pow: Enter The Fist: “Let your anger be as a monkey in a pinata.. hiding amongst the candy.. hoping the kids don’t break through with the stick!

Favorite movie soundtrack.

Godzilla (1954)

Top 5 films of your favorite actor and actress.

Kurt Russel: The Thing, Big Trouble In Little China, Escape From New York, Stargate, Tombstone. And for Sigourney Weaver: Alien, Aliens, Ghostbusters, Cabin In The Woods, Galaxy Quest. Pretty much applies to their Top 5 Performances for me NO I AM NOT USING AN EXCUSE TO SKIP IT.

A movie storyline you wish you had actually lived.

Pacific Rim, because holy SHIT dude.

A movie that reminds you of your mom.

The Thing. Thanks for letting me scar myself at 3am with cable tv one summer when I was 7.

A movie that reminds you of your dad.

The Godzilla franchise. He bought me every film on VHS that was available in the US, took me to see the 1998 film, the first and only wide released TOHO film Godzilla 2000, and continuing to watch all the new ones since 2016. Thanks, dad.

Favorite movies from your childhood.

Godzilla, Carnosaur, Xtro, The Fly, Mortal Kombat, The Thang

Favorite quote(s).

I know you gentlemen have been through a lot. But when you find the time… I’d rather not spend the rest of the winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!

Top 5 favorite female performances.

Anne Hathaway (Colossal), Sigourney Weaver (Aliens), Miho Yoshioka (Godzilla Tokyo S.O.S.), Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim), Naomie Harris (28 Days Later)

Top 5 favorite male performances.

Keith David (The Thing), Roddy Piper (They Live), Idris Elba (Pacific Rim), John Goodman (10 Cloverfield Lane), Chris Pine (Into The Woods)

Favorite year for movies.

Can’t quite place a good exact year, but a number of my favorites mainly came from the early 80s period.

Your favorite movies from [insert year].

2016 brought us Arrival, Shin Godzilla, Colossal and Train To Busan off the top of my head.

Favorite [insert actor/actress/director] movies?

John Carpenter

List all you’ve seen from [insert actor/actress/director].

If you know his filmography, then there you go.

An underrated actor.

I don’t think John C. Reilly gets enough love. He played a really good serious and comedic role in Kong: Skull Island. He could do a lot more given the chance I think.

An underrated actress.

An underrated director.

Gareth Evans. Go watch The Raid 1 and 2.

An overrated actor.

Jim Carry.

An overrated actress.

Scarlett Johannsen

An overrated director.

J.J. Abrams. Wasn’t a big fan to begin with. Saw Super 8 when it came out, that REALLY didn’t help. I have no faith in whatever the hell he is doing with the supposedly still in development Half-Life and Portal films

A film you wish you had seen on the big screen.

Would have killed to see Shin Godzilla during the limited run here in the US. FUCK.

A movie you’ve seen that you think no one else’s here will have heard of?

Pontypool. Zombie film where the virus is transferred through language.

Favorite movie characters.

R.J. MacReady, Snake Plisskin, Dr. Daisuke Serizawa, Ellen Ripley, Mako Mori

A film that was better than the book.

Stalker was loosely based off Roadside Picnic, but I like how much more vague things were than straight up alien stuff.

Best remake.

The Thing, straight up

Your first favorite actor.

ARNIE

Your first favorite actress.

Sigourney Weaver

Favorite animated film.

Dead Leaves

Your most anticipated films.

Antlers, Godzilla vs Kong, new Tohoverse Godzilla films

Last movie that disappointed you.

Pacific Rim 2 was an absolute trash fire

Last movie that surpassed your expectations.

Rampage. It looked like a dumb, fun video game movie, but it ended up being a hell of a lot better than I expected. Hell, I loved it.

Actor in need of new agent.

idk lmoa

Actress in need of new agent.

I still dk lmoa

Share an unpopular film opinion you have.

Jar Jar was not so bad that his actor needed to be bullied so badly. Neither was Jake Lloyrd. You wouldn’t believe how many people shit on Jake Lloyd. Poor kid’s mental health suffered horribly and no one ever talks about him or how much they regret bullying him like they did Jar Jar’s actor. Also Leonardo DiCaprio isn’t attractive.

Favorite Oscar win/speech.

Biggest Oscar snub(s).

Who do you think is overdue for another nomination/win?

I have never watched the Oscars. For real.

How many movies have you seen (rough estimation)?

According to Letterboxed I’ve seen 2,032 films, counting short films.

A movie that made you go ‘wtf was that’.

The Void was an incoherent mess to me. Really sloppy editing and cuts made a lot of it just seem like a mess.

A film that scarred you.

The Thing made me afraid of dogs for a long time as a child

Most movies watched in a single day.

9 different Godzilla films across multiple eras

A film that always makes you cry.

I don’t fucking know why, but Click

A film that always makes you laugh.

Kung Pow

Movies that you think everyone should watch (not necessarily your favorites).

Critters 1-3, Gremlins, Pirahna, Kung Pow

A movie that took you a couple of viewings to appreciate.

Sunshine

A book you want to see adapted to the big screen.

Statement Of Randolph Carter and relative stories

A book you really, really, really don’t want to see made into a film.

A full adaptation of Roadside Picnic. Americans are already about to fuck up Metro 2033.

Favorite child performance.

Quinn Lord was creepy as Sam in Trick ‘r Treat

Favorite pre-code.

The Island Of Dr. Moreau

Favorite silent film.

Nosferatu

Favorite coming of age film.

CRITTERS

Favorite superhero film.

The Rocketeer

Best cinematography.

The Thing

Movies you know you should watch, but can’t bring yourself to do it?

John Wick, Shutter Island

Favorite genres.

Scifi, horror, comedy, action, western, romantic films

Least favorite genres.

coming of age films, torture porn

Biggest movie pet peeve.

characters more powerful than everyone else just because of writer self-insert bullshit, self-insert bullshit in general

[akysi]

Always wanted to do one of these, and now I have. :D 8 years of improvement, wow! I’m also really bad at picking things so I don’t know if I picked the ones that best represent my progress, but eh. I did some edits, but the original base for this can still be found here. Extended thoughts about each year below, it’s a lot! Here’s to bigger and better things in 2019 (please ;_;)

2010: I started drawing digitally in 2006, though regrettably I didn’t save any of the art I did back then. 2010 was when I joined DeviantART, and thus when I started uploading art online. I had frequented DA well before that though (from about 2007 I think), and influence from the artists I followed are pretty evident. A few notable ones were ShaloneSK, Fourth-Star (now SeaSaltShrimp), and thazumi, all primarily dragon artists. Though none of my traditional art is showcased here, this was still a time when I did it often, usually via doodles in class when I was bored. The digital art you see here was made with my first tablet, a Wacom Graphire 3, and Photoshop Elements 3 that came with it. I had little knowledge of file quality, layering, colouring, and other mainstays in using Photoshop properly. Humble beginnings are these! My art education at this point was limited at best, but art was always something I did in my spare time. And like all of the art years leading up to 2010, I drew almost entirely dragons. Aside from practicing foxes for a story I had at the time, I wasn’t interested in drawing much else. I didn’t draw people at all until college, but we’ll get to that. 2011: Christmas 2010 / New Year’s 2011 marked the time I got Photoshop CS5, a version of PS I still use today. For a while I was obsessed with the idea of PS’s Pen Tool, as I saw it could give me much cleaner line art than what I could achieve on my own. I was finally able to test that when getting CS5, and while it worked well for the time, I soon learned the tenets of line weight and tapering, something I would have to practice myself. Up to this point all of my lines were either shaky or fabricated via the Pen Tool, and it shows. This was also a year of trying to mimic Fourth-Star’s dynamic perspective...without any knowledge of how it actually worked. Not a lot of improvement happened here outside of that. 2012: This was the year I bought my Bamboo Create tablet, something I still use with my laptop nowadays. I remember trying it out at my friend’s house before I bought my own, and really loving how I was able to do the line tapering without the pen tool. It still took a lot more practice, but looking back now it was easy to see I was on the way to making line art one of my art’s strongest qualities; something that stays true today. I find it ironic that line art used to be one of the weakest aspects of my digital art, but I suppose that speaks to how far I’ve come. I did more fanart this year, oddly enough. I’d always done it before but I guess I felt shy about sharing it. Notable fandoms were Danny Phantom and Sonic. I didn’t grow up with either, but ended up liking them both a lot, and would doodle them as much as my dragons. 2013: I graduated high school and started my first year of art college, specifically Art Fundamentals at Sheridan College. At this point, everyone I knew pointed to that school (and only that school) for anything related to what I wanted to do; if it wasn’t fine art, go to Sheridan. So I went into college with a bit of tunnel vision at first, but I knew from the start that I would be gunning for animation. Not to animate specifically, but to do character design / concept art for animation. I would learn later on what having this tunnel vision would mean for me, but we’ll get to that later too. This is about the point where more expansion of design and subject matter occurs, albeit slowly. The art featured here doesn’t include my schoolwork, but the much needed increase of anatomy, structure drawing and other college level art courses started me on a path to better things. I still had a long way to go though, and Fundies could only do so much. Unlike most people I actually got decent practice from it given my limited art background, but I still can’t say it was at peak efficiency. This was the first year I actually started drawing people, and it certainly didn’t come without its growing pains.

2014: Surprising no one, I didn’t get into Sheridan after my first year, though that didn’t stop me from being disappointed at the time. I took what was effectively the second year of Fundies, called Visual and Creative Arts (VCA). This was the year that sparked my interest in graphic / logo design, an interesting turn of events all things considered, and that would stick with me a lot more than I expected. This year also featured a few smatterings of character designs, or more specifically design sheets with multiple views, costumes, etc. Character design was a required segment of the animation portfolio, so this is likely what spurred my practice in it, aside from my pre-existing interest. That does not mean I knew how to rotate a character though, yikes! At this point I’d gotten pretty good at clean line art in Photoshop with my current tablet, as well as the merits of high quality imagery. There was a lot of purple in this year and 2015, though that’s nothing really new for me.

2015: This was easily the busiest (and most path altering) year. Second semester of VCA happened during this time, but also what would be new beginnings for me. If I didn’t get into Sheridan animation, I had a choice to make for a plan B: Either stay at Sheridan for VCA Year 3 and try again for animation, or try to get into animation at another school. My buddy Amelia then dropped Seneca’s name in one of my elective classes, and I had no idea how much of a fateful conversation that would be. She mentioned it was considered a second to or even better than Sheridan, and that at least provided a clearer answer for me. A lot of trepidation followed: I didn’t get into Sheridan animation for the third time, and thus applied to Seneca (and a few other places). I was pretty scared of being a first year again at a new school with new people, and while my art definitely reflected the time I spent at Sheridan, I had no confidence in it being good enough for a portfolio given my track record. But low and behold, I got in! I was on my way to a three year rollercoaster of all-nighters, amazing ride-or-die classmates, and relentless, rigorous training. The art from this year does reflect this, both in quantity and quality of uploads, though in more of a “transition period” kind of way. This was the year I really started to draw human characters, most notably with the creation of my first comic project: Starglass Zodiac. This was the first time I had a story idea with a primarily human cast, much less a comic idea, though the designs for them didn’t start appearing in my uploads until the following year. As you might expect I didn’t have a lot of confidence in drawing people. Ironically, my first year of animation taught me all the skills I initially needed for the portfolios!

2016: When I mentioned a path altering year for 2015, I was referring specifically to the path in my art education. 2016 was a path altering year for everything else, and a polarizing one at that. 2016 was a year that was kind to no one, and while the details of what happened to me are not really relevant to this post, there’s no denying what effect it had behind the scenes. This was the year that I fully realized I’d developed symptoms of depression, and with my increasing anxiety to match, this didn’t (and still doesn’t) go so well. I don’t think that’s really reflected in my art, however. Regardless of my mental state, the outside view of my art still features the colourful characters that they always had. By this point I was in my finishing first year / starting second year, and this was easily the best time for me. My time to shine, if you will, at least when it came to character design class. We had an overarching story project that was perfect for SGZ, so I used that time to develop the characters. The double-edged sword of troubled times is my escapism is cranked to 11, so this was probably the year that spurred the most story ideas out of me. This year (and part of the next) started both Id Pariah and Feather Knights. I got my iPad Pro for Christmas this year too, and that proved to be a game changer in the amount of art I could make. I was already used to the Cintiqs at my school, and I was lucky to finally have a screen tablet of my own. 2017: The end of my second year and the beginning of my third and final year of animation. Classes split, streams chosen and a world of missed opportunities began. I didn’t do a lot of art at the beginning of the year, aside from the beginning of my Feather Knights stuff. On top of that, my college had a 5-week long teacher’s strike that literally no one wanted to be a part of, effectively derailing all hope for a good semester. Attempting to do a short film project with this happening was a recipe for disaster. During this strike was the start of my first month long challenge though: Huevember. It was an uncertain time, and most of us were not compelled to get much school work done. Completing Huevember did feel like an accomplishment though, as I was actually able to keep up with it even when school started again. I’d say this art year focused a lot on colour for this reason. What art I was able to complete outside of my schoolwork saw a lot of expansion in that area. In all honesty 2016-2018 tends to blend together for me, for better or worse. 2018: My graduating year. The strike did its damage to my final semester too, but ultimately I survived. Despite completing 5 years of college, my path became the most unclear. Third year taught me a lot of things about myself and how I approach art, but most were not positive revelations. The expectations set out for me are ones that I cannot achieve. However, I have more time than ever to do art, making this year the most art I’ve made to date. I also participated in Inktober, which reminded me how far I’ve come as an artist, despite not doing traditional art for what felt like a century. My illustrative work for Inktober ended up being some of my best art this year, and the prompts made me get creative in more ways than one. The dark cloud hanging over my head has not disappeared since 2016 however, and the toll that has taken shows more everyday. As far as my art was concerned I did more of what I loved, mostly in the form of character sheets and designs. It’s all I can do, for now. 2019, I have one thing to say: Don’t you DARE.

[daylightbegins]

Writing Update

This is mostly just a list of fics that I’ve started since NaNo ended October (wow, I’ve been horrible about updating. lol.) for those of you who are interested. Assuming I don’t ramble too much I’ll stick a note at the end about what I’ve been working on the most lately.

Mac Memoir AU: Set current day-sh. Mac didn’t came back to the States after getting stabbed in Fallujah in 2009, but she’s back now and working on a memoir about her time as a foreign correspondent. She calls up Will to talk about the book. Ten years on he’s retired and not as cranky as you’d expect.

Current Day AU (Sloan’s playing  matchmaker): Sloan tries to set Mac and Will up on a work date but Will’s not having any of it until he decides it’d be fun to mess with Don (his current EP) who needs someone to cover for him while he’s on vacation.

Nebraska Backstory Swap: Sloan’s the one from Nebraska this time (I have so many backstory swaps, sorry not sorry). Mac’s caught without enough people for her panel 40 minutes before air so she strong arms Sloan into agreeing to fill in. Sloan who used to work in marketing and now does data modeling with Neal for the website. [I’m trying to squeeze this into something short but it’s falling kind of flat without enough setup.]

Sports AU/Cuddling for Warmth: Mac and Will have a friendly snuggle/nap on the bus after a match/game/meet. [oneshot for my bracket fic challenge. This is my second attempt with this prompt set and I’m still not sure what’s missing.]

Breanna AU: Premise: Mac’s asexual, Brian is now Breanna (I can’t turn Brian into a wholly good guy. ugh.). Mac asks Brea to sleep with her because she doesn’t want to sleep with Will, find out she finds the whole thing utterly repulsive and have to explain that to him. Things don’t quite go according to plan. Fast forward four years to when Will asks Brea to write the New York Magazine piece.

Why Did You Tell Me AU: Mac doesn’t tell Will about Brian. Things continue as planned: they get married, have twin boys, Will semi-retires and goes back to consulting/practicing law part time while Mac works for a local news station to be able to spend more time with the boys. She slips up, says something that grabs Will’s attention and he can’t let it go; she tells him about Brian and suddenly they’re on rocky ground. The story picks up from there.

The other post-NaNo stuff I’ve been working on: I have a Valentine’s day fic (between seasons 2 and 3 plotted in my head. We’ll see how long it takes me to get it down on paper. Similarly I have a female bodyguard AU swimming around in my head without a plot other than Will’s traveling for work and needs some discrete security. Sloan suggests Mac. I’m thinking St. Lucia, pool time, leather jackets, and bossy!Mac.

And the the older stuff, aka the stuff I started in November:

Family of Choice/Cabin AU (prompt bracket fic): Mac’s spent the last couple of years getting shipped off to various boarding schools and then finally a military school because she’s not really into following rules she doesn’t agree with. Problem is she doesn’t have anywhere to spend the summer so Sloan invites her to stay with her, at Will’s cabin and now 19 year old Will is stuck with 17 year old bookworm MacKenzie.

Mac ends up Car Camping in Will’s driveway: AU with no real plot yet

The first Sports/Cuddling for Warmth AU: Cabin in the ‘dacks after a cross country meet. Sloan thinks Mac and Will are adorable. Also it snows.

Nebraska Radio AU: Domestic/future gen AU. Mac runs a radio station in Nebraska. Will’s one of her hosts. They’re married with kids and a few issues. Don and Sloan have a couple of kids, Jim and Maggie are married with baby #2 on the way. Charlie’s retired and is everybody’s grandpa.

Acro AU: Basically just an excuse for a circus like AU. Trapeze and aerial silks. Mac is Will’s new partner. He’s not happy about that. He’s less happy about being berated by Sloan for being a jerk to Mac because as he finds out Mac left her previous job after some traumatic events.

Pre-series Mac and Will on vacation: This may possibly be morphing into somewhat of an AU. Cabin in the woods. Early days. Mac wondering what the hell she’s doing with Will.

Intertwine: Mac and Will through the seasons if Wade hadn’t existed and Will was less interested in Nina and/or Mac and Will both had some serious impulse control issues. Definitely not PG.

Another Musician AU: Charlie’s a manager at a well known record label playing matchmaker with some of his artists. Will’s kind of a big thing but quickly realizes Mac’s a whole lot more famous then him which makes  her a sellout in his books until he realizes she’d be happy to give it all up. She started out as a child star and she’s sick of her mom masterminding her whole career.

Crime Reporter AU: Mac’s just broken a story on corruption in the city police department. While her name’s been left out of the byline everyone still knows it’s her and she’s having a hard time doing her job. Working for the Brooklyn DA Will steps in to help and ends up tangled in a mess when a bunch of guys decide to try and shut Mac up a little more forcefully.

Forensic Pathologist AU: Mac gets pregnant in med school (decides not to practice medicine) and marries Will. Now he works for the DA and she travels around helping identify victims of violent crimes. One part domestic!fic, one part omgCharlienooo

Family of Choice/Wilderness AU: Will and his gang are headed to his cabin Upstate to hunker down and wait out the dystopian nightmare playing out in much of the country. Everything’s going great except Mac won’t stop picking up strangers. Will’s pretty peeved about this but starts coming around to the idea after Mac adopts 8 year old Jenna.

Church and Horses AU: Will meets Mac after Sloan insists he come to the church dinner to meet people since he’s relatively new in town. He’s a large animal vet. Mac’s a mom with four kids and a jerk of a husband who’s just left her for a more exciting life.

Mostly I’ve been working (kind of) on my original backstory swap (Mac’s the anchor with issues up to her eyeballs and Will’s the EP). I’ve made it through the first part of season 3 plotwise. The last couple of days has been a lot of the ‘Why Did You Tell Me AU’ with a couple of chunks on the Brianna AU. I’ve also worked on some shorter stuff that didn’t make the list above for brevity’s sake. I’m not sure any of it’ll ever get finished but at least I’m writing something :) I’ve also been messing around with the current day AU (election night is in 2016 instead of 2016; Will sticks his foot in his mouth and doesn’t fix it before the night is over -> trying to stick to any sort of news timeline is making my brain explode) and the Mac Memoir AU.

[sol1056]

season release & demographics

Alright, I’ve gotten several asks about the speed of the upcoming season releases for DW/Netflix. Most asks amount to roughly

are they releasing that fast because they want it over, or because more stuff is coming? 

...with at least two asks attempting to make sideways snarky comments about the revelation of a canonically gay character. 

Behind the cut: some stats on how DW groups and broadcasts its series, some data-based theories on VLD’s scheduling, who the ‘real’ audience demographic is, and some speculation about show timing independent of VLD itself.

how DW groups and broadcasts its series

First thing I should note is that dropping a chunk of episodes at once onto Netflix is relatively new for DW, compared to their years of traditional weekly syndicated format on Nick, CN, etc. (You can find a list of all past and present television productions here.) Starting around 2014, their Netflix/DW works were mostly the usual children’s fare -- episodic shows made for syndication. 

Two shows changed this game: VLD and Trollhunters, both premiering in 2016. Each contain one continuous arc, requiring viewing in order, from the start. Unfortunately that means the only real comparison is Trollhunters, which had a 12-month gap between S1 and S2, and a 5-month gap from S2 to S3. Just before the final season broadcast, DW announced two sequels, which brings TH’s total ep count to 78. Remember that timing; it’ll be important in a bit. 

Looking across even the episodic younger-set stories, it does seem like releases try to stick to a general pattern, give or take a month. Across 8 multi-season shows, here’s the breakdown of cours (because you know I had to throw a visual in somewhere). A single cour is 11-14 episodes, 5-7 eps is a half-cour, with 26 being a double-cour. (One series released a 16-ep season, which I counted as a single cour.) 

I point this out just to make clear that half-cour drops are actually rather common, comparatively. Out of 31 episodes, 11 were half-cour. As for the length between seasons, the mode (most common) is 7 mos.

some theories on VLD’s scheduling

Now let’s look at the gaps between VLD’s seasons: 7, 7, 2, 5, 3, 2 (counting the upcoming release for S7). If we merge the half-cour seasons for comparison (so we’re dealing with consistent 13-episode seasons again), then we’ll posit the broadcast date would’ve been the date the 2nd half of the season aired. In other words, had we gotten the original S3 (now S3/S4) season as one, it would’ve aired on S4′s broadcast date, as one solid chunk. 

With the consistent pattern of S1 through S3′s data, that’s a 7-month break between seasons. Assuming that this would’ve originally been set as the scheduled dates, let’s compare those dates to the actual broadcast dates.

scheduled Jun 2016 ==> aired Jun 2016

scheduled Jan 2017 ==> aired Jan 2017

scheduled Aug 2017 ==> aired Aug + Oct 2017

scheduled Mar 2018 ==> aired Mar + Jun 2018

scheduled Oct 2018 ==> aired Aug 2018

scheduled May 2019 ==> aired ???

Yes, I’m aware DW spun the split-seasons as getting more episodes, sooner. It’s the reverse. We should’ve gotten all of S3 in August, but S3 was completed 2 months late. Same for S4, which we should’ve gotten in March, but compared to the original schedule, S4 was 3 months late. S7 (the original S5) is the first time we’re getting anything ahead of schedule, 2 months earlier. 

If we go by the usual pattern of 7 mos gaps -- and counting from the actual broadcast date of Aug 2018, that would put the concluding 13-ep drop at May 2019. However, at least two other series have dropped their final seasons with a much smaller gap: from 8 down to 3, 12 down to 5.

Which means that dropping S8 (the original S6) in December would be a gap of 4 months from S7′s broadcast, or alternately, a 2 month gap from the original schedule. That’s pretty dramatic, compared to half the time, which would’ve put us at March of 2019. 

why the last season comes so fast

When Dawn of the Croods dropped its final season, it came with the announcement that this would be its last. When Trollhunters dropped its final season, it simultaneously announced that two sequels were in the works. And check this out, with hat-tip to @ptw30 for the sharp eyes:

Voltron’s got a film in development, and it’s under the aegis of the Dreamworks Animation team. (Oddly, that ‘S’ notation comes with a note saying the film will combine live-action with animation. I have no idea whether that means rotoscoping or actual live-action with lots of CGI.) 

My guess is that on, around, or shortly after the final season of VLD drops, we’ll get an announcement about the upcoming film that will attempt to build on the series. That’s a matter of timing, though, so it’s just my guess (and things can change). 

the ‘real’ audience demographic

When asks make comments about VLD being unsatisfactory to the ‘primary demographic’ (and doubly so now that we’re talking about a canonically gay character, cue asshat-sounding commentary about gay hookups)... the assumption is almost always that the primary demographic is men. Probably men aged 18-30. 

Wrong. It’s women. Specifically women between 25 to over 50.

But since this is supposedly a for-kids show, let’s start with appealing to families. There are 73.7 million children under 18, and 69% of them are in two-family households. 23% of those children live in single-mother households. (The largest growing family demographic is gay families. Go ahead, explain to me why a kid watching television shouldn’t see a role model in a relationship like their parents have.) 

Guess who does the majority of the buying choices for families? Women.

A few facts about women as a market, in the US: the estimated purchasing power of US women ranges from $5 trillion to $15 trillion annually. Women control more than 60% of all personal wealth in the U.S., and 75% are the primary shoppers for their families. Women are buying 66% of all tech purchases, 65% of all car purchases, 89% of all bank accounts opened, 93% of all food purchased, and 92% of all vacation expenditures. 

Oh, and while I’m at it: 

45% of all gamers are women. 

Women over 55 spend more time gaming online than men aged 15-24. 

Also, millennial women (roughly early 20s to mid 30s) have 3.4 social media accounts on average, compared to 2.6 for GenX women; 61% of them are online and sharing content at least once a day. However, Gen-X women spend more time onine (7+ hrs/week) than Millennial women (6hrs/week). And then there’s Boomer women --- of the age to have seen Voltron when it first aired --- with a market share of $19 trillion. They tend to spend, on average, 250% more than any other bracket -- which is pretty phenomenal buying power when you consider that every fifth adult in the US is a woman over 50.

A show pays for itself with merchandise and toys --- and if you can swing the women’s market, you’ve got it made, ‘cause they’re ones doing the buying. That means appealing to mothers who make the vast majority of their household’s purchases, or women up to and including the over-50 gamer pop-culture-savvy women with spare income (who are also the fasting growing online demographic, while we’re at it).  

So, miss me with that 'primary demographic’ crap. If it doesn’t appeal to boys but appeals to women 25-50+, it’ll do fine. The reverse --- of appealing to boys but not to women --- is a visual media that’ll be lucky to break even. DW hasn’t made it this far by alienating the ones who are making the purchases. If they realized that Shiro appeals most to women aged 25 to 50+ (which he does; he’s that age bracket’s favorite character) then you damn well better believe they’re going to keep him front and center. 

why else dreamworks might be wrapping up

There are other factors in play. In 2013, DW partnered with Netflix for the first time, and since then it’s produced 16 series for Netflix. Only two series were exempt, one broadcast in France, the other on Amazon video. 

Of the 9 series currently in pre-production, 4 will be on Netflix (She-Ra, 3 Below, Wizards, and Fast & Furious). The remainder are broken up between Amazon, cable TV, Universal, and two most recent that don’t even have homes, yet. Dreamworks is moving out of Netflix, excepting the pre-existing contracts they can’t quite break. 

This is the result of net neutrality, to be perfectly blunt. 

Check out who owns whom, here. (Larger version at recode.net.)

Comcast owns Dreamworks, and a 30% stake in Hulu -- of which Netflix is a direct competitor. I’m on AT&T and already noticing throttling happening for Netflix, and at some points for Tumblr (Verizon-owned). Scuttlebutt says DW is going to be pushed into moving its content onto Hulu, to support its parent company’s business agenda. 

*** ETA: there is no good business reason (at this time) for DW to switch to Hulu. Netflix’s market share is easily ten times the size of Hulu, and switching will cut DW’s products off from a significant number of viewers. ***  

That means DW is probably being strongly encouraged to wrap up its Netflix contracts and start shifting to Comcast-owned or controlled markets. And that has nothing to do with VLD itself, or even how popular (or not) that it’s been on Netflix. It’s a command coming down from on high, and now that we’ve lost net neutrality, there'll be less and less gain from sticking with Netflix.

[coolgirl]

how do i start reading about the batkids i’m really overwhelmed help

fuck it if I know… probably the smartest way to tackle it is to follow this list, which pretty much covers the vital Batman related arcs. PERSONALLY, I don’t care about reading about all the batkids, I just picked my favorite ones and just.. read everything I could about them (and lucky for me my favorite batkids don’t have thousands and thousands of comics so ! yay!) here’s some reading orders I made (except for the Damian one)

Jason Todd

Stephanie Brown

Cassandra Cain

Damian Wayne

Duke Thomas

Okay so, if u wanna read it in some kind of order, heres a bit of a general chronological-ish list thats probably innacurate bc i haven’t read all of these and the ones i did read was.. a long time ago. anyways, i hope this is useful, and again, imo its not necessary to read everything in order, but this might help to know a bit whats the timeline of some major events i guess? also i’m definitely going to be editing this post as people point out the mistakes rip! 

(the batkids i added to this timeline are the ones that have active roles in rebirth atm, Dick, Barbara, Jason, Helena, Tim, Stephanie, Cass, Damian, Duke, and the basics of Azrael, Kate, and Luke because i love them)

Dick’s time as Robin (that i have no clue how it goes but uuuh read Robin Year One / The Long Halloween / Dark Victory / The New Teen Titans up until #53)

Batgirl: Year One  

Birth of the Demon and Son of the Demon (here’s the original comic about Damian getting conceived)

Jason time as Robin (post crisis) stop before death in the family

Nightwing: Year One 

Batgirl Special #1 - The Last Batgirl Story 

unfortunately… you gotta at least know a bit of what the killing joke is about

NOW read death in the family… two blows one after the other, If you’re reading the trade that includes a lonely place of dying DON’T read that yet

now you can read the rest of the new teen titans up to #59

now A Lovely Place of Dying, which is Tim’s introduction. 

rest of ntt if u wanna

NOW for oracle!barbara you can either read the suicide squad comics as a whole, which includes little hints of her coming back, or you can skip to  issues #48 and #49. Then The Batman Chronicles #5.

Huntress Vol. 1 - Helena Bertinelli’s introduction

NOW! Steph’s introduction happened on Detective Comics #618

Stephanie’s list, if you’re following the whole list stop at Robin #70 (Tim’s solo is really good to know about them)

Azrael vol. 1: Fallen Angel - Azrael’s introduction

Batman: Knightfall - you know the infamous pic of bane snapping batman’s back like a stick? here it is.

Nightwing (1996)

Young Justice (1998) (NOT the one based on the tv show)

Birds of Prey i would say.. up to #7 

Batman: No Man’s Land

now it’s Cass Time!  Batman #567 was her introduction, and Detective Comics #734 n Legends of the Dark Knight #120 are vital to her story.

Batman & Huntress: A Cry for Blood / Huntress: Year One

Titans (1999)  

Batman Gotham Knights (2000-2006) is a good comic for batfam interactions

Rest of Birds of Prey ig

Teen Titans (2003)

Batman: Hush

Batgirl Volume 1 up to #52

War Games (when Stephanie dies rip)

rest of Batgirl

Batman Lost Days / Batman: Under the Red Hood 

Robin #172-174 (2008) steph comes back!!

Batman: Batman and Son He (Damian) is here babette

Batgirl volume 2 (2008-2009) and  Batman and the Outsiders (2009) are good cass comics up to #14

Robin/Spoiler Special (2008) 

Batman R.I.P. 

Final Crisis

Batman: Last Rites

battle for the cowl SUCKS the only important thing to know is that Dick is Batman now

Batman & Robin (2011) up to #12

Batwoman: Elegy 

Batgirl (2009) up to #14

The Black Mirror is a really good bats dick story.. or so i’ve been told

Red Robin

Batman: Return of Bruce Wayne #1-4 

Batman and robin from #13 to #14

Batman: Return of Bruce wayne #5-6

Batman and Robin #15-16

Batman:The Return 

Batman INC. (2011)

everything else in Batman and Robin, and Batgirl

Gates of Gotham #1-5 (2011) 

OK NOW.. N52. So new 52 was the reboot and it basically just took everything i just mentioned and threw it out of a fucking window. Changes: Barbara is Batgirl again, Cass and Stephanie didnt exist in this timeline for like four years, somehow Jason isnt such a dick, i think Damian didn’t get so fucked over, and uuuh i have no clue what happened with Dick and Tim but i think their whole story with their teams (teen titans / titans / young justice) got incredibly fucked over. Almost every single member of the Batfam (that didn’t get booted from this contuinity) got either a solo or a team book, which are. super good to start, reading order be dammed, but the batfam went through a lot of shit (court of owls, the joker, bruce kinda died, jim gordon became batman, bruce didnt remember anything, dick kinda died and got exposed but came back as a spy, damian died, bruce lost his mind, they kinda went to hell, damian came back, dozens of robins ran around, etc etc etc) so im gonna try to order it as best as i can T__T

Batman, Vol. 4 (Secret City) / DC Comics: Zero Year / Batman, Vol. 5 (Dark City)- Okay so, this wasnt the starting storyline for New 52 but its basically the basis of the batfam and co and introduces Duke and Harper so it’s kinda vital.

Ok so here you can start reading the first volume of.. any of the titles lol. Red Hood and the Outlaws / Batgirl / Batwing / Nightwing / Batman and Robin / Teen Titans

Batman: The Night Of The Owls  

Batwoman (2011-2015) 

Batman INC up to #6 - im gonna be honest this run fucking sucks but uh important stuff happens here

Nightwing / Red Hood and the Outlaws / Batgirl / Batman and Robin / Batwing / Teen Titans Vol. 2 (approx the issue #9 of all these runs were included in the Night of the Owls crossover)

Death Of The Family - this one.. bad.. but ig its important

Nightwing / Red Hood and the Outlaws / Batgirl / Batman and Robin /  Batwing / Teen Titans Vol. 3

Batman INC #7-8 - okay so. Damian’s death. 

Requiem / Batman and Robin: Requiem - the aftermath of Damian’s death. The first one isn’t collected afaik so i liked you to a reading order if you’re interested 

Nightwing / Red Hood and the Outlaws / Batgirl / Batwing / Titans Vol. 4 (here’s Luke Fox’s introduction!)

Forever Evil - the one where shit happens to Dick that i think leads to Grayson and all that spy bs

Yeah.. Grayson now (vol 1-2) - Helena gets re-introduced here!

Red Hood and the Outlaws / Batgirl / Batwing / Teen Titans Vol. 5

Batman Eternal - where Steph gets re-introduced

Batman and Robin: Robin Rises

Batman Endgame (Batman #35 -#36, Batman Annual #3, Batman #37- #39) - Duke is back!!

Grayson Vol 3 

Superheavy (Batman #41-44 / Detective Comics #41-46) - ok so Bruce is gone and now Jim Gordon is Batman.. just nod and smile

Ok so now, Red Hood and the Outlaws and Batgirl don’t get involved in any big storylines anymore, and Teen Titans started from #1 again. 

Teen Titans Vol. 1-2

We are Robin Vol 1 

Batman and Robin Eternal - where Cass gets re-introduced 

Robin: Son of Batman Vol. 1

Red Hood/Arsenal Vol. 1

Robin War 

Grayson Vol 4

Teen Titans Vol. 3-4

Red Hood/Arsenal Vol.2

We Are Robin Vol. 2

Robin Son of Batman Vol. 2 

Super Heavy Part 2 (Detective Comics #47-52 / Batman #47-52 )

OKAY SO. Rebirth is a continuation of New 52, but with some changes bc almost every single damn character got.. lets say nerfed, and people didnt like it so they’re slowly bringing back some elements from pre 52. Here basically just read whatever whenever unless you wanna get into like. the metal event. then i would recommend you to start off the bat with that to get it out of the way as some comics have tie ins. Then heres where the kids appear

All-Star Batman (2016-2017): Bruce and Duke 

Batgirl (2016): Barbara and sometimes Dick

Batgirl and the Birds of Prey (2016): Barbara, Dick, and Helena

Batman (2016): originally Bruce and Duke but now its the Batman and Catwoman show

(if you’re interested in Duke i would say to read those two first as it explains where his character stands on Rebirth)

Batman and the Signal (2017): pretty self explanatory

Batman/Shadow (2017): Damian appears sometimes but.. i heard Bruce is a dick to him here so fuck it

Batwoman (2017): Kate and Julia 

Detective Comics (2016): Cassandra, Azrael, Kate, Tim, and Stephanie

Nightwing (2016): Dick, and sometimes Damian and Helena. 

Red Hood and the Outlaws (2016): Just Jason except for the annual that had Dick too

Teen Titans (2016): Damian.. baby boy leads a team

Titans (2016): Dick

Super Sons (2017): Damian team sup with Jon Kent (Superman’s kid)

and finaaally.. some elseworld stories (basically aus) that have cute batkids interactions

Tiny Titans (2008-2015)

Lil’ Gotham (2013-2014)

[futuresandpasts]

Futures & Pasts | MRR #421

As seen in Maximum Rocknroll #421 (June 2018): coming full circle from my very first column which also featured Melbourne’s foremost Fall freaks the Shifters, plus some crucial ‘80s post-punk reissues via Louisville + New Zealand & the new Northwest DIY crash-pop cassette wave. 

I wrote about the debut cassette from Melbourne’s the SHIFTERS in the very first column that I did for MRR three years ago, which gives me all sorts of complicated and confusing feelings about the passage of time. And as evidence that sometimes it takes awhile for historical wrongs to be righted, that criminally limited tape is now finally available in its entirety as an LP on the new French label Future Folklore, following the two songs that resurfaced on the Creggan Shops 7” courtesy of It Takes Two back in 2016. The SHIFTERS’ stark, repetitive minimalism and shambolic charms always owed more than a little bit to the FALL in their early years, and revisiting the material from the cassette now just a few months after Mark E. Smith’s passing only reinforces the psychic connection between the lackadaisical post-punk twang in “Captain Hindsight” and the cracked melodies of something like the FALL’s “Your Heart Out” from the Dragnet era. “Creggan Shops” is as close to a contemporary successor to those brilliant first two MEKONS singles as I’ve come across, from the tense interplay between the melodica and a creaky violin, to the scritch-scratch guitar, to the nonchalantly harmonized dual vocals, all sounding like they’re perpetually on the verge of coming undone. There’s way more at play here than blatant UK DIY worship, though—it’s not a huge jump from the homespun, pastoral pop of ‘80s Australian DIY legends like the PARTICLES and the CANNANES to the SHIFTERS’ raggedly melodic “Colour Me In,” and “The American Attitude to the Law” sprawls into a lengthy VELVET UNDERGROUND-addled haze, if only LOU REED had written songs referencing “drinking cough syrup to fall asleep” instead of heroin. One of the best releases of 2015 when it first came out on cassette, and this vinyl version is definitely going to be tough to top in 2018. (Future Folklore, futurefolklorerecords.bandcamp.com)

YOUR FOOD were an early ‘80s quartet from Louisville, Kentucky whose off-kilter, stripped-down art-punk mirrored the similarly self-styled approach of other DIY groups from that era who existed outside of major cities. Their only proper recorded output, 1983’s self-released Poke It With A Stick LP, was just reissued by Drag City at the behest of fellow Louisvillian David Grubbs (formerly of SQUIRREL BAIT and BASTRO, among others), and it’s pretty essential stuff for anyone interested in the chapter of American weirdo post-punk that took shape just before “college rock” became the dominant underground cultural force in the mid-to-late ‘80s. “Leave” and “New Pop” both layer simple, endlessly repeated basslines, obliquely narrated vocals, and trebly stabs of guitar into spartan drones that share the jaggedly danceable sensibility of what was happening a couple of hours to the south in Athens, Georgia with bands like the METHOD ACTORS or PYLON, even though YOUR FOOD were way more likely to switch up to a frantic, thrashy punk fit at a moment’s notice (see the last thirty or so seconds of the otherwise choppy and COME ON-esque “Cool/Cowtown”). There’s a sharp-cornered, chaotic shamble to “Here” that isn’t too far removed from RED KRAYOLA’s late ‘70s post-punk incarnation, and there’s even some touches of UK DIY-style naive jangle in “Corners” before it collapses into noisy abstract guitar squall mid-song. Totally freewheeling and ramshackle bent-punk bliss! I’ve seen a few references to the fact that MRR “refused” to review the LP when it originally came out, so hopefully I’m doing some small justice to Poke It With A Stick here 35 years later. (Drag City, dragcity.com)

I’m most certainly a card-carrying member of the Flying Nun fan club, but I’m also always really happy to see some renewed attention being given to some of the darker and more obscure corners of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s New Zealand underground, beyond the Flying Nun roster and the bands typically associated with the whole storied Dunedin sound. NOCTURNAL PROJECTIONS have often (and rather unfairly) been termed the Kiwi JOY DIVISION thanks to the combination of some deeply propulsive basslines and Peter Jefferies’ dramatically icy baritone vocals, but you could just as easily connect the dots between their take on bleak and razor-edged post-punk and what dozens of other UK-based bands like the SOUND or the CHAMELEONS were doing more or less concurrently. The two 12” EPs and one single that they released before splitting up in 1983 have been impossibly difficult to track down for quite a while (at non-collector scum prices, at least), and the consolation prize has been a selection of songs from those releases that made it onto a 1995 CD-only collection called Nerve Ends in Power Lines, plus a handful of roughly recorded 1981 demos that were excavated for 1998’s Worldview 7”. After all of the recent vinyl reissue campaigns focused on long out-of-print records by some of the most beloved New Zealand groups (who generally happened to be backed by Flying Nun in their day), NOCTURNAL PROJECTIONS have been long overdue for a similarly comprehensive treatment, so endless appreciation is due to Dais Records for stepping up to remedy that situation with the new Complete Studio Recordings anthology, collecting every song from the three original releases on one remastered LP. Even at their darkest and most desperate, like on the sinister, industrial-decay clang of “Another Year,” NOCTURNAL PROJECTIONS never slipped into the sort of over-the-top goth pretensions that were de rigueur in the age of 4AD’s ascendency, and vocal delivery aside, the slashing and anthemic “In Purgatory” honestly has more in common with MISSION OF BURMA or HÜSKER DÜ than, say, BAUHAUS. Highest possible recommendation, and an excellent counterpart to Superior Viaduct’s recent reissues of Peter and Graeme Jefferies’ more avant-garde/experimental post-NOCTURNAL PROJECTIONS project THIS KIND OF PUNISHMENT. (Dais Records, nocturnalprojections.bandcamp.com)

TRASH ROMEO are a very new duo from here in Portland featuring two people who have been in most of my favorite local bands over the last couple of years, including GOLDEN HOUR, the BEDROOMS, and CONDITIONER. Everything about their debut cassette Moving in the Summer brings to mind the pre-internet, early-to-mid ‘90s romance of mail-ordering singles from paper catalogs and building up imagined realities of geographically-centered scenes that you’d only ever read about. Alex and Danny both rotate between guitar, drums, and vocals, crafting sparse crash-pop with a hint of basement punk snarl that picks up a few loose threads from the parallel riot grrrl-adjacent musical universes of Olympia and Washington D.C. The haunting opener  “Cheryl Blossom” juxtaposes delicate-yet-tangled melodies with some darkly angular AUTOCLAVE/SLANT 6 flashes, and sugary sweet TIGER TRAP-style harmonies are at the center of “Night Terror,” while “Teen Vogue” recalls the raw, minimalist lo-fi punk of EXCUSE 17 or even KICKING GIANT at their most raucous. Simple, direct, and deeply personal anthems for loners and outcasts everywhere. TRASH ROMEO definitely make me feel a major nostalgia for some of the formative reference points in my young teenage musical upbringing in the 1990s, but it never seems like they’re simply reproducing specific cultural signifiers from the past in a modern context—in 2018, you could say it’s the difference between posting digital scans of pages from an 1992 issue of Sassy magazine on your blog, or choosing to make your own zine with only a typewriter, a glue stick and a photocopier at your disposal. Also worth mentioning: their first show was their tour kick-off show and they were the only band that played it, which just might be one of the most amazing and punkest moves I’ve encountered in a long time. (trashromeo.bandcamp.com)

[wrestlingisfake]

All In preview

This is the big independent show everyone’s been talking about.  Several big promotions have allowed their talent to do this show, but none of them are directly running this show.  Cody Rhodes and the Young Bucks are promoting this out of their own pockets, which is pretty amazing when you think about it.

This all came about because some guy on Twitter asked Dave Meltzer asked if Ring of Honor could run a 10,000-seat venue and Dave was like “not anytime soon” and Cody was like “I’ll take that bet.”  Then everyone was like “what market is going to have enough hardcore fans to fill a building that big?” and Chicago was like “hold my beer” and the place sold out in 30 minutes.  So yeah, fuck Wrestlemania going to New York and Florida all the time, we’re gonna do our own Wrestlemania with indy guys and stupid storylines off of Youtube!

This will be airing live on pay-per-view, ROH’s Honor Club service, and Fite.tv, with a one-hour pre-show on WGN America.  September 1, 6pm Eastern/5pm local.

Nick Aldis vs. Cody Rhodes - This is for the NWA world heavyweight championship, which Aldis won last year--the same title Cody’s father held in 1979, 1981, and 1986. 

Aldis is probably best known as Magnus for his run in TNA, where he held what is now the Impact world title.  (He also held the Global Force Wrestling world title for most of that group’s existence.)  Cody is, of course, a former ROH world champion and WWE intercontinental champion; he’s a top act in ROH and part-time special attraction with New Japan Pro Wrestling.  He’s also one of the promoters of this show, which may or may not give away the finish.

The great irony here is that “independent wrestling” used to mean “wrestling unaffiliated with an NWA member,” but now the NWA has no members, which means it has the most prestigious championship that is truly independent of the major players today.  The current NWA business model, under Billy Corgan, is to fly the champion around to other people’s indy shows, resembling the old-school pattern of Harley Race or Ric Flair coming to an NWA territory once or twice a year.  Since this show isn’t being promoted by a group with its own world champion, it’s a perfect fit for that model.  So it’s a good thing Aldis got booked, because if he hadn’t the NWA would’ve looked pretty bush-league.

The main story here is that Cody and Corgan arranged this title match without consulting Aldis.  Aldis then tried to hold out for added incentive to defend the title, suggesting that if Cody regained the ROH world championship they could have a double title match.  Cody came up short, but still managed to goad Aldis into accepting the challenge.  Obviously the crowd for this show is going to be solidly behind Cody simply for making this show possible, and moreover they’re going to be into the angle that Cody has a chance to recreate one of his father’s career highlights.

I don’t foresee a lengthy NWA title reign for Cody, since his obligations to ROH and New Japan probably don’t line up with Corgan’s business plans.  However, if I was Corgan, I’d want to get the belt on Cody while he’s the talk of the wrestling world.  At the very least, I’d want to set up a Cody/Aldis program to run through October’s NWA anniversary show and maybe even the ROH/NJPW Madison Square Garden show in April.  So a title change makes sense, but it’d depend on a lot of things falling into place behind the scenes, so it’s not a lock either.  In the end, though, this is a bad weekend to bet against Cody.

Kenny Omega vs. Pentagon, Jr. - Omega holds the IWGP heavyweight championship--the top title of New Japan--but the title is not at stake here.  Penta works all over the place but is probably best known from AAA and Lucha Underground.  His biggest accolade is possibly the LU championship, but he also briefly held the Impact Wrestling world title earlier this year.

This is easily the biggest dream match that this show could book.  To the average US wrestling fan, Omega is the hottest guy in Japan and Penta is the hottest guy out of Mexico.  But since Penta’s never really been to NJPW or ROH, and since Omega’s never really been to AAA or Impact, there’s never been a way to book this match on a big show...until now.

I don’t really know anything about Pentagon except that he’s fucking scary, dude, and I’m pretty stoked to finally see what this cat’s deal is.  Omega has made a name for himself delivering some of the best matches of the decade, but Penta is a brawler so this won’t be a wrestling clinic.  It should be a unique spectacle, worthy of this one-of-a-kind event.

I feel like New Japan would not authorize this appearance if their champion was going to lose, so I would be very shocked if Penta wins.

Kazuchika Okada vs. Marty Scurll - Okada isn’t quite the ace of NJPW, but he’s getting there, especially after a record-setting 720-day run with as IWGP champion.  Scurll is a junior heavyweight in NJPW, but in ROH he’s approaching the main event level, and if he sticks around long enough he’ll probably become their world champion.  In Japan, heavyweights and junior heavyweights almost never compete against one another one-on-one, so this match is automatically a rarity.

Scurll is sort of just there in the grand scheme of things, but within the context of a 10,000 indy wrestling fans in Bullet Club shirts, he’s practically the second coming of Christ.  Between the quality of his opponent, the historic nature of the event, the favorability of the crowd, and the timing of his peak popularity, this could be the match of Scurll’s life.  But that said, he’s bound to lose, because I can’t imagine New Japan allowing an upset to disrupt their pecking order among the weight classes.  That’s fine with me, because while everyone else will be whooping for Scurll, I’ll be there to see Okada.

Rey Mysterio & Fenix & Bandido vs. Kota Ibushi & Nick Jackson & Matt Jackson - Fenix is the brand-new AAA heavyweight champion.   Mysterio is a former WWE champion and the current champion of Mexico’s #3 group, The Crash.  There isn’t much info (at least, not in English) on Bandido except that he’s worked in CMLL, AAA, and various smaller promotions.  Aside from being a finalist in NJPW’s G1 Climax tournament this year, Kota Ibushi is legendary for his high-risk style and his preference to be a freelancer rather than commit to a single company.  Nick and Matt, the Young Bucks, are currently the IWGP heavyweight tag team champions, and have become synonymous with the post-ironic style that has defined the modern age of indy wrestling.

There really isn’t a story or direction to this match beyond getting all these guys in the ring at the same time to work with each other.  The Bucks do their spots with everyone in the indies, this is their big special show, and so as a special treat they’re going to do their shit with Rey and Fenix.  Ibushi seems to be here because Kenny Omega is occupied elsewhere, and to get his last chance to work with Rey before Mysterio returns to WWE.  Bandido seems to be here primarily to do the job, which kinda suggests Ibushi and the Bucks are winning.

Hangman Page vs. Joey Janella - Page is one of the lesser white guys in Bullet Club, but he had a decent run in the G1 Climax recently, and it seems like he’s starting to move up in the world.   Janella is best known for a) Joey Janella’s Spring Break, GCW’s Wrestlemania weekend event and b) a 2016 match with Zandig where they did an insane rooftop bump into a pickup bed filled with glass and barbed wire.  This is being billed as a Chicago street fight, which could mean anything really but generally means no count-outs, no disqualifications, so you can fight all over the place, but you still have to score a fall in the ring.

The, uh, storyline in this match is that Page, yeesh, either murdered Joey Ryan or believes that he did.  Joey Ryan is arguably the most popular American indy wrestler who is not booked on this show, and he’s conspicuous by his absence since a good chunk of the build for this show is about his fate.  Anyway, Page is, uh, afraid to wear his cowboy boots because they keep...well...talking to him about how he’s going to kill “another Joey,” apparently meaning Janella.  So yeah, the big idea is that it’s significant that Ryan and Janella have the same first name.  It’s like that whole “Martha” thing in Batman v. Superman, only dumber.  This is what happens when the main television for your show is Being the Elite, which is slightly less absurd than Southpaw Regional Wrestling or Z! True Long Island Story.

In any case, Page is suitably deranged enough to brutalize Janella, which means Janella has sufficient motivation to go sickhouse on Page.  These two ought to give us a good brawl and some nasty hardcore spots.  Dave Meltzer seems to think this could steal the show, and I wouldn’t go that far, but it might have everyone talking afterwards, if only for sheer wtf-ness.  I’m not sure it matters who wins, but Page is the one who’s friends with the promoters so I’d bet on him.

Jay Lethal vs. the winner of Over Budget Battle Royal - Lethal (probably best known for his Randy Savage impression in TNA ten years ago, and a sexual harassment scandal this summer) is defending the Ring of Honor world title against whoever wins the battle royal in the pre-show.  Since the battle royal includes at least one woman, there’s at least a chance this could become an intergender match.  This is the biggest match on the show that does not involve any members of Bullet Club, although I suppose the battle royal winner could, like, join Bullet Club or something.

Being the Elite has been setting up the idea that Lethal’s “Black Machismo” persona is re-emerging, so the big angle for this match is the hype that Lethal might bring that stuff back.  I don’t know how that will play off of whoever wins the battle royal, but I guess they have some crazy idea.

For historical purposes, a title change at this show would be a feather in ROH’s cap.  But I don’t expect them to see it that way, or for the battle royal winner to be anywhere close to ROH’s ideal world champion.  I’m picking Lethal to retain.

Christopher Daniels vs. Stephen Amell - Daniels has been around so long that he appeared (as a jobber) on both sides of the Monday Night Wars, won the first King of the Indies, held the IWGP junior tag title with Daniel Bryan, and became a founding father in the early history of both ROH and TNA’s “X” division.  These days he’s primarily known as the leader of ROH’s SoCal Uncensored faction.  Amell plays the superhero Green Arrow on TV, and became friends with Cody Rhodes through Cody’s appearances on that show and a celebrity tie-in match at Summerslam 2015.

During the whole “Joey Ryan was murdered” storyline, Amell was arrested but then later it came out that Daniels framed him.  I feel like that should leave Daniels in deep legal shit but I guess we’re not worrying about that.

Amell is looking to prove he can hold his own in the ring despite his limited experience, and Daniels has the challenge of making him look even better than that.  I think they’ll probably do fine.  That said, I don’t watch Arrow or Being the Elite and I barely even pay close attention to ROH weekly television, so I sure don’t give a fuck about this match.  I guess Amell wins. 

Tessa Blanchard vs. Madison Rayne vs. Chelsea Green vs. Britt Baker - Blanchard is the reigning Impact women’s champion and WSU world champion; neither title is not at stake.  This is presumably a standard four-way where the first wrestler to score a fall wins the match.  This is the only women’s match on the card--okay technically Jordynne Grace is in the battle royal but that’s not really the same thing.

Rayne is probably best known for her tenure in TNA/Impact (she held the women’s title five times), although she recently competed in both the ROH Women of Honor tournament and WWE’s Mae Young Classic.  Green wrestled as Laurel Van Ness in Impact and is of late appearing in Lucha Underground.  Baker has yet to really move up into the bigger indies, so her biggest claim to fame may be as one of the jobbers Nia Jax squashed early in her run on WWE Raw.

There really isn’t anything at stake in this match.  In theory a victory over Blanchard would set up a title match, but this isn’t Japan and I don’t know if Impact or WSU will really care who wins here.  So it kinda just comes down to whoever Cody and the Young Bucks want to go over.  I tend to think that’ll be Blancard since she’s the next big thing in women’s wrestling.  Although if somebody’s looking to make a statement about the next next big thing, that could be a case for pushing Green or Baker.

Jay Briscoe & Mark Briscoe vs. Frankie Kazarian & Scorpio Sky - This is currently scheduled for Zero Hour, the free pre-show.  The Briscoes are the current Ring of Honor tag team champions, but as far as I know the title is not on the line.  To build for this match, SoCal Uncensored made a video where they’re training like it’s Rocky III.  The Briscoes responded with a video in which they can’t really be bothered to watch a damn 12-minute YouTube video, but then they do and they like go all dark and shit like it awoke something inside of them.  I don’t understand why every angle for this show has to be like one of those Channel Awesome crossovers where they team up and fight supervillains or whatever.

Anyway, I always kinda dug the Briscoes, it’ll be neat to see ‘em live finally, and I think they’re gonna win.

Over Budget Battle Royal - This is set for the pre-show.  Assuming it’s a standard battle royal, the match begins once everyone has entered the ring, and can only end when all but one participant has been eliminated.  The last one left is the winner, and qualifies to challenge Jay Lethal for the ROH world title later in the show.

This has been announced as a 15-person battle royal, although I doubt the exact number is a hard requirement.  Named participants so far are:

Colt Cabana (ROH)

Moose (Impact Wrestling)

Brian Cage (Impact X division champion)

Jimmy Jacobs (Impact Wrestling)

Punishment Martinez (ROH television champion)

Rocky Romero (New Japan)

Billy Gunn (WWE legend)

Austin Gunn (Billy’s son)

Jordynne Grace (WSU Spirit champion)

Ethan Page (Chandler Park from Impact Wrestling)

Marko Stunt (a very small indy guy)

Brandon Cutler (PWG)

It’s worth pointing out that CZW champion MJF was booked for All In but as of this writing hasn’t been put in a match.  So I’m kind of expecting him to end up here, although I don’t see the point of withholding that information until the last minute.  Similarly, a huge part of the All In promotion has been Flip Gordon’s failed attempts to get on the show, and it seems ridiculous to resolve that by just not using him anywhere.  Also similarly, I can’t believe the “murder” of Joey Ryan is such a big deal with this show and that the actual real live Joey Ryan won’t be wrestling on it.  The promotion of All In has been really weird, basically.

Other surprise entrants that I could see happening include Pac (formerly Adrian Neville, who has very recently been released from WWE), and Austin Aries (the Impact world champion).  Considering Jordynne Grace is already there, it wouldn’t be a big deal to add additional women.  However if there’s any group that I believe Cody and the Bucks want to see more represented in this match, it would be one-note running joke performers like Papa Buck, Cheeseburger, or Chico El Luchador.

The finish here is going to depend on which winner can have the most entertaining title match with Jay Lethal.  If we’re talking “biggest match possible,” that’d probably be Brian Cage or (if he’s available) Austin Aries for the “ROH vs. Impact” vibe.  If we’re talking “local guy hometown pop,” then Cabana is the obvious choice.  But if the plan is to follow through on an angle that’s particularly important to the target audience, then it pretty much has to be someone who hasn’t been announced for the match yet, which means literally anything is possible.