#instead it turned into a bit of a style experimentation piece

[bluginkgo]

"Nice Corpse House My Guy" Remastered Behind Scenes!

The most glaring and obviously annoying thing that's evident in this comic- if you even wanna call it that- are the god forsaken BACKGROUNDS. There was a lot of experimentation going on for backgrounds here. Because the first couple pictures, THAT is what I used to draw backgrounds as. Trees are sticks and grass is flat. I realized that wasn't gonna cut it. I didn't like it at all. So I started experimenting and boy was it messy. It finally sorta settled on the style by the end of the comic. I'm still unhappy with it, but it'll have to do for now.

Here's a small comparison

One thing that I ran into was how I was gonna show that N was in his "killer mode." I could have placed the X's over the pupils, but found it unnatural looking in my style. So instead, it was settled to a concentrated light in the pupils.

Best seen between these two. The second N snaps out of it, the X/light in his pupils disappears, and the normal light returns to his eyes, which is similar to Uzi's.

Another thing I started slowly including was Uzi's little tooth on her beak.

The jutting out portion on her beak is a personal touch. Although it doesn't really matter, I included it to separate her from the rest of the "worker drones." Seen as she's an absolute solver host and has a solver form, something was going to creep up in her crow design, hence the little teeth. Doll would have them too, given I draw her in the form I've been thinking about.

Another thing I ran into, was WHAT WAS UZI GONNA TAKE N DOWN WITH?! This is a bird vs. a dog! No way was a bird gonna decommission a whole dog! Then this scene came up in my recent rewatch of Murder Drones.

And it clicked. Loooong long time ago, I had a very specific hyperfixation: birds. One thing I learned that some pigeons do, was they're capable of doing a somersault. And in mid-air, too!

I was finally set. The SICK AS HELL RAILGUN was downgraded to a simple piece of shiny glass/pebble that attracted Uzi- and crows love shiny things. And the same pebble will be used to launch at N's sensor that made him trip over. Because I was also not going to draw N doggo losing his head. I love gorey and bloody shows and art- hence why I watched Murder Drones- but I honestly had no idea how to recreate that, and I suck at drawing gore in general, I mean, did you SEE the crow N was chewing on? That was my best try honestly.

Here are some progress shots and how the layers worked in the scene where N is bonked with a stick.

As per usual, start with a sketch, this is actually 2nd sketch. The first is much rougher, just some circles and random shapes to outline his body form.

Then, this is all outlined and rendered. Along with some additions like the stick and the little rock.

The background was the hardest, aside from some weird angles I picked to draw Uzi and N at. I suck at backgrounds, like I've mentioned many times before. So, this needed a lot of testing and experimenting. Most of this works because I found some cool brushes to use. But aside from that, I honestly still don't like how it looks. It's slightly better than my stick trees and flat grass though, I guess.

Put it all together, add a black layer to simulate nighttime, put some lights to show moonlight through trees and voila, you've got an N doggo that got bonked by a stick! I see this project/comic mostly as practice and testing. Background testing mostly, and some brushes. The background/brush testing actually spilled over into another post of the solver Uzi I made a bit back. I'd say I was pretty happy how it turned out, but brush wise, I was going to test around a little more.

NUzi comic 'Sleep' is my next project. Uhhh, don't ask me when I'm gonna have it out, I have no idea. I'm guessing sometime end of Jan and beginning of Feb. But that might be delayed seeing as Murder Drones ep7 should be out sometime soon too, so I'll need to go crazy about that for a bit and then I'll go back to my usual thing ^_^ 'Sleep' will take place still between the Pilot and Heartbeat.

P.S. I have all 26 pages story boarded... good god what happened to the 'mini' part of the comic 😭

Anyways, why are you still here?! Have a cookie ^_^ you made it! Have a nice day now, bye bye <3

[iztea]

When i first started digital i would make a layer for everything basically for the face clipping make several layers to it and same for the hair/ background/ every piece of clothing...etc

I did take it down a notch recently and all but i just saw a video from samdoesart and noticed he LITERALLY JUST USES ONE LAYER FOR THE WHOLE PAINTING!!!??

sorry was wondering if you'd recommend a certain number of layers

the amount of layers you use is highly dependent on the style you're going for, the complexity of a piece, your personal drawing style and preference etc so i really don't believe there should be a certain amount of layers you should use. I myself fluctuate between using many layers or just painting everything on one so there really isn't a correct way or number to go for.

Howeverrrr, i think there is a certain threshold where layers become too excessive and turn into more of a burden than an aid, something that you probably noticed as well. If you find yourself becoming frustrated with the constant switching between layers for every single part you've singled out, then it's better to take notice of that and just tone down the number a bit. Samdoesarts, despite his guynextdoor vibes, is a professional and so of course he doesn't feel the need for many layers because he knows what he's doing and has a very clear workflow and style in mind. To some extent, i believe that using a minimal amount of layers does also stem from a place of confidence in your skills and/or process.

Me personally, I tone down the layer amount moreso out of laziness and because i don't like to have my flow interrupted by some "technical" errors as in "whoopsie i painted on the wrong layer again" so i just., really try to keep it as low as possible; sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't and i suffer

I add new layers every time i want to " try something new" or fix something whenever i'm still unsure of how it will turn out. New layers are for experimentation. I treat them like some sort of backup or checkpoint of some kind- that's their primary function for me. If the new thing i tried painting over doesn't work out i can just hide the layer i painted on and either try again or give up on that idea as i concluded it doesn't look good. A safety net, if u will.

One rule i do follow however no matter what is to always always have a separate layer for the hair- both color and lineart. that is the only thing i make a conscious decision to keep separate (because of previous struggles and failed attempts) For everything else, I just paint it on one layer with those aforementioned experimentation layers on top. Same for rendering. And i always merge them together once i think it looks good

I really don't like having too many layers cause it becomes annoying and messy. The only time I deliberately use a shiton of layers is for commissions, really.

i know i didn't really answer your question, but i really don't think i can recommend a certain number, so i just shared my experience with layers instead. Bottom line is, as long as you find them helpful, use as many layers as you want but don't overdo it

[supernovafreaks]

THE MAIN CAST!

NOVA: Our dashing protagonist! A demigoddess of the stars with a rebellious streak and an appetite for fun and adventure. Having an extremely lavish upbringing, Nova soon learns that living in the real world is no cakewalk! She’ll run into a situation where she’s way in over her head and she'll get far too cocky for her own good and wind up making things worse for herself and everybody, sometimes succeeding at a task by complete accident. Even though she was raised by royalty, Nova tends to be a pretty crass and vulgar girl whose inflated ego likes getting her into fights over something as small as the last piece of sushi. She's determined (or just stubborn and naive enough) to stop at nothing to regain queendom and show the Great Galactic Guild who's boss! Or maybe, deep down, she actually wants something more and doesn't even know it yet!

BECCA: Nova's most trusted friend (and eventual girlfriend) hailing from the slums of Neo Neopolis. Having years of experience from secretly being in a ruthless gang to get money to support her struggling family, Becca uses her street smarts and her mighty fisticuffs to get herself and Nova out of any hairy situation they may get into. Despite her rugged exterior and muscles that can pulverize your skull in one karate chop to the cranium, Becca tends to be a kind and gentle soul who wants nothing but the best for those she holds dear, occasionally to a fault. One evening, Becca decided to visit her parents to confess her secret, only to find that they were kidnapped by rival hoodlums! Becca, having lost nearly everything close to her, decides to join Nova on her quest not only to help her out but to rescue her family as well!

ISAAC: A manic young college dropout who runs an electronics repair shop in his cramped studio apartment. When he’s not guzzling energy drinks and scoring #1 victory royales, he uses whatever tech skills he has to make cool gadgets for the team, often using illegally obtained parts from shady folk. Isaac has a remarkable talent for bargaining with others to get really expensive, often untested parts for dirt cheap. Sometimes he even trades in old broken game console parts to fool the unfortunate buyer into thinking they can make plastic explosives with them. Isaac has made COUNTLESS enemies this way.  He tags along with Nova and the crew because he believes that Nova’s cosmic powers can help out the planet’s energy crisis and ward pesky otherworldly critters away. He kinda also has a big crush on Nova’s mom.

MUZZLE: A robotic dragon with a short fuse and a seemingly infinite assortment of weapons! Muzzle was destined to become a useless pile of scrap metal after running away from his abusive creator. But then Nova and Becca totalled a stolen car after making a jump into the junkyard. Instead of barbecuing them alive, the girls offer to fix him up and eventually get the parts to turn him into a cool battle mech, which is where Isaac comes in. Nothing brings this mechanical monster more joy than blowing shit up and unleashing absolute hell upon everyone. However, the squad usually has to calm him down before he goes full psychopath. He's also glad to fly Nova and the others through the cosmos with style and grace thanks to his experimental lightspeed warp drive that Isaac downloaded from the dark web.

QUASARIA: Nova's caring mother and former queen of the Star Weavers. An absolute sweetheart to everyone she encounters! However, her parenting skills could use a bit of work, as she shows a bit more favoritism towards Nova, seeing a bit more of herself in her than older sister Lyra, who feels ignored and rejected. The wrongful death of her husband also doesn’t help much, causing her to gradually let herself go and fall into a space alcohol induced depression. After Nova’s exile, she sets off on a journey of her own to see if Nova’s okay and learns to become a better parent in the process!

[ILLUSTRATION MISSING]

PULSARIS: A lost soul wandering through space who found Nova one night after she got her first celestial relic. He doesn't remember where he came from or what his purpose is, but he gains a bit of a symbiotic relationship with Nova and acts as her guide and father figure throughout her adventure. Only Nova can see him which leads to some pretty awkward moments where Nova shouts into the void. Along with the relics aiding Nova, they also help Pulsaris regain his memory and life force.

[ILLUSTRATION MISSING]

LYRA: Nova's uptight older sister who got crowned as the new queen of the Star Weavers by default due to Nova's exile. She's basically the antithesis of everything Nova is. Responsible, mature and always having good manners. Lyra takes her position seriously but has a hard time standing up to authority, often giving in to the Great Galactic Guild's ludicrous demands. Poor Lyra got the short end of the stick as Quasaria always favored Nova so Lyra relied on outside sources to train.

ACHERNAR: Our devious antagonist! She was once a low ranking Star Weaver. Tired of being seen as average and insignificant, she set out to obtain relics that would give her true power and the same amount of respect as Quasaria! But she ended up toying with stuff beyond her comprehension and got corrupted by relics made of dark matter, giving her a monstrous new appearance! Which she takes absolute pride in, of course. Having learned to control the chaotic material that could very well consume her entire being, Achernar set off on a petty revenge quest to chase Nova and the gang around to obtain the Celestial Relics before they do so she can call our heroes stinky poopoo heads and commandeer her own demented Star Weaver army that will bring chaos upon the universe!

[REDACTED]: Having been sealed away in an impenetrable barrier by the Star Weavers eons ago, this indescribable horror lures Achernar over promising to grant her any of her deepest wishes and desires as long as she promises to fetch it as many relics it needs to make her dreams a reality. Achernar, too stubborn to realize that this is obviously a trap, foolishly accepts its offer. Near the end of the story, Achernar gives it all the relics it needs and predictably backstabs her and breaks free from its prison, going on a rampage to destroy and consume every single bit of matter in the universe until absolutely nothing remains but a dark, endless void! Nova and Achy must call a truce and let bygones be bygones to put a stop to this apocalyptic, universe ending scenario!

Thanks for coming to my ted talk! More updates to come in the future!

[stargazostli]

i am new here so I could be off, but looking through your art I'd say your main style features are simple (often cell-based) shading with otherwise an emphasis on the flat colours, A kinda simple cartoony (as in not super realistic) style that has hints of anime styles but otherwise doesn't belong strongly in any one art genre, and a slight leaning towards muted/earthy but still (in their pieces) bright colours!!

And well it's not a visual bit of style, when I looked at them all together + your year in review I could definitely see improvement and experimentation!! overall your art gives the vibes and style of someone trying new things and still learning /pos which is a good thing trust me, it's always good when you can see an artist's progress in their works, A good sign for the future <2

this, mayhaps?

idk man, like anon said, im still learning and trying stuff ans actually really like how this turned out

tho to be fair its not quite an evil art style, maybe instead a mildly devious art style

uhhh idk im just spouting words, ive had a long day lol

gonna post a silly doodle of Joel later also (and by later i mean in like 5 mins or less)

[ruinedcasket]

tagged by @suburbanbonfire for a hockey art tag game, thank you so much :DD

rules: post your first ever hockey art, your latest hockey art, and your favourite hockey art, then tag three hockey artists.

FIRST ONE!

I made this one in July of 2023 and it started off as a brush test after years of default medibang brushes and then realizing I have free will and can switch to krita instead :)

I only really started becoming interested in hockey after I made this one which is why I'm still very fond of the piece, I gained a new fixation and also more options when it comes to experimenting with my art :D

LATEST ART!

I'm cheating a little bit and skipping over some of my latest unfinished pieces because I like this one more >:)

you can tell my style has shifted a lot even just in a few months, I've focused a lot more on my linework and I'm still trying to find the best brushes to suit my drawings. I have a lot of fun with more illustrative pieces like this and it's definitely less polished than the artists that inspire me but that's what experimentation is for!

I like that these first two are almost exactly a year apart, same subject but completely different styles and application of skill.

MY FAVOURITES!

I think I struggle with expressions in my pieces sometimes and so I'm very happy with how both of these turned out!

this one was so fun, I love the brush I used and I felt very confident about the lines during the process :)

I made this one ages ago when I still had the energy to use a more painted style and I miss drawing like this so much!!! I can't even remember how many different textured brushes I played around with for this one and all on the same layer.

I remember being so relieved that this one was finished but then I was devastated when I realized the file size was too small to upload as a print :')

TAGS :>

now I get to tag some of my favourite hockey artists >:D everyone on here is so incredible and each of their styles inspire me so much! I don't know who has or hasn't been tagged yet because I'm a hermit so if they have been tagged then now I just get to compliment them!

@krllkprzv - such a cute style that I absolutely adore and I desperately want to know what brushes they use >:o

@rinksrats - beautiful portraits, I can't even describe how pretty I think their work is!

@seaquestions - their furry canucks pieces are so so good and I have a better quality of life for having seen them.

[kulturegroupie]

Discover Jimmy Page pt. 2

I'm gonna join a band: The Yardbirds days

from pageysartgallery

One week after quitting his lucrative career as a session musician, Jimmy found himself at the right place and time - backstage at an Oxford Yardbirds show, just as bassist Paul Samwell-Smith announced he was leaving the band. Jeff Beck asked him if he would temporarily join in to replace Samwell-Smith, and Page agreed, not knowing that Beck had something else in mind.

Jimmy would keep showing up at the studio for session work throughout his entire career, every now and then, when his other musical commitments made it possible.

But this was not the first time Jimmy was offered to play in the Yardbirds: in fact, the other band members were trying to secure him a place in the band as early as 1964.

“The very first time … [Yardbirds manager] Giorgio Gomelsky said that Eric was going to have a ‘holiday,’ and I could step in and replace him. The way he put it to me, it just seemed really distasteful and I refused - Eric had been a friend of mine and I couldn’t possibly be party to that.”

– Jimmy Page, Trouser Press interview, 1977

When Clapton left the group in 1965, The Yardbirds again turned to Page, who turned them down a second time, recommending his pal Beck instead. However, by the time the infamous 1966 gig in Oxford took place, things seemed to have changed quite a bit.

Page got his third offer to join The Yardbirds in 1966 following Samwell-Smith's department, and on the way home from the show Jimmy had attended, Beck asked him if he’d finally join and take his place until they could find another bassist. Page agreed, thinking he’d sit in until they found someone to play the instrument. However, Beck's plans were different:

“Jimmy wasn’t a bass player, but the only way I could get him involved was by insisting that it would be okay for him to take over on bass in order for the band to continue. Gradually — within a week, I think — we were talking about doing dueling guitar leads.”

– Jeff Beck, from ‘Light and Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page’

“Beck had often said to me, ‘It would be really great if you could join the band.’ But I just didn't think it was a possibility in any way. In addition, since I'd turned the offer down a couple of times already, I didn't know how the rest of them would feel about me joining.”

– Jimmy Page, Trouser Press interview, 1977

“[Yardbirds Drummer] Jim McCarty says I was so desperate to get out of the studio that I'd have played drums”

– Jimmy Page, Rolling Stone interview

The Yardbirds took the stage for the first time with Page as a member on June 21, 1966, at London’s Marquee Club. After that, rhythm guitarist Chris Dreja learned the bass guitar and Page played second guitar to his buddy Beck.

Sadly, the Page-Beck lineup was short-lived, with only a few recordings featuring their twin guitar style. I have collected each one of these tracks and put them in a little playlist, which I'm linking here:

Beck was booted from the band later in 1966. Page remained the band’s lead guitarist until the Yardbirds took on new members and morphed into Led Zeppelin two years later.

During these two years, Jimmy would transform The Yardbirds into psychedelic blues heaven, pushing them into new experimental territories, aided by his now famous violin bow. However, this would not appear on their only studio album recorded with him, in favour of a more radio friendly sound - as dictated by their new-hired producer Mickie Most. This would be one of the reasons for the band's demise.

The album, “Little Games” (released July 1967) was a commercial and critical non-entity, despite containing some interesting tracks. One of these is “Glimpses”, a piece featuring bowed guitars, pre-recorded noise loops and a hypnotic wah-wah guitar groove with Page credited as the main writer.

By 1968, everyone in the band was inspired to pursue other projects - except for Jimmy.

The band's final single was “Goodnight Sweet Josephine”, with an interesting B-side, “Think About It”, featuring a proto-Zeppelin riff and snippets of the “Dazed and Confused” guitar solo.

The Yardbirds played their final shows on 31 May and 1 June at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, and on 4 and 5 June at the Spring Fair at the Montgomery International Speedway in Alabama. The Los Angeles shows were documented in the bootleg “Last Rave-Up in L.A”:

The Yardbirds announced the departure of Relf and McCarty in a press release on 12 June, and Rolling Stone magazine announced the break-up by saying that Page “intends to go into solo recording work”.

Recommended album:

I absolutely recommend listening to Yardbirds '68, an album containing live tracks recorded at the Anderson Theater on 30 March 1968, as well as demos from the Columbia Recording Studio sessions in April of the same year - released in November 2017 on Jimmy's own record label.

“We thought this might be lost forever, but we’ve rediscovered it, re-mixed it. It’s of great historical importance. We’re delighted to see the release.”

– Jim McCarty, Chris Dreja and Jimmy Page, November 2017

As Jimmy joined The Yardbirds, the time he dedicated to session work understandably decreased, but a few gems were nonetheless recorded around this time. A few worth citing are “Hurdy Gurdy Man” by Donovan, his stunning contribution to Joe Cocker's album “With A Little Help From My Friends” (I recommend listening to the title track & the song “Something's Coming On”) and the soundtrack album for the film A Degree Of Murder featuring Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones and the famous pianist Nicky Hopkins:

Some memorable live performances that are available on YouTube are this one, recorded on July 22, 1966, featuring Jimmy on bass, Chris Dreja on rythm guitar and Jeff Beck on lead guitar:

Another performance close to my heart is this live version of “Dazed and Confused”, filmed on March 9, 1968:

There's also a short Jimmy interview available on Spotify, where he talks about touring and The Yardbirds' situation in 1968:

Gallery:

[twistedy]

What have I been up to?:

(Super long read)

The read is worth it tho

Summary:

(I play a drawing video game and learn some stuff to improve my art abilities. New full render coming out on Sunday. Get excited.)

What was I doing?:

While I was gone, I was playing a game on roblox called "Spray paint". And basically you just paint anything on the walls of an abandoned skate park and let other people view and like your drawings. I have made a few pieces and this game really helped me develop a new style that utilizes zero black lines to convey realistic attributes. With this development, I have also changed the designs of two upcoming characters that will be featured in my comic!

Who are the featured characters?:

The two (new) bots have gone through some major design changes as I got to play the game more. One character who already has their named revealed to be "Raven" is reserved for a future robot piece. Her latest design is the very first picture in the collection. The second new bot will remain unnamed at this time until a post showing off his full design comes out. His latest designs are in the 8th and 9th pictures.

The third bot you should see (in the very last picture) is a redesign of "Aleister". He now has four large bat-like ears, bigger hands, two red horns on top of his head instead of the sides, and two metallic antenna cylinders on the sides of his head. I don't know why I decided to redesign him but now I realize that I needed to spice him up a bit more.

Different art style?:

As you can see throughout the pictures, the box-head robot; and "Raven" have very drastic changes between each piece. This is when I was deciding on what their canon design should look like. And eventually to come to an reasonable design that I am satisfied with. These are my two first ocs that have been created with the assistance of Roblox. And I am happy that I also have developed a new art style along with this. I am planning on using less black lines in my art to make the pieces look more realistic. At the moment I am still learning how to use this new style in Procreate, so further adjustments will have to be made.

When do we get new robot post? I'M HUNGRY!!!:

Don't worry my followers, turns out that I have been cooking something while I was gone. My next robot piece releases on Sunday at 1 PM like it always has been. This new piece will reveal the name of that box-head, skibidi toilet TV man looking, robot dude (The robot is not a reference to Skibidi toilet), and showcase a new experimental style that can enhance my photo-realistic ambitions! So stay tuned for that!

[snapinatorarts]

Art fight tread! I'm getting real experimental this year, and I'll be showing off some pieces that turned out especially well!

For more information on each drawing, check out my art fight account! Go Team Werewolves!

Art dump after the break. --

54 characters in 2 days. I deeply regret not taking breaks. Still turned out great! --

I'm pretty happy with this one. I kinda wish I had used a dark outline instead of a white one, but it still looks cool! --

Probably my least experimental one since this is my default doodle style, just a bit cleaner. Still super fun to do and it turned out great! --

The background was very much an afterthought, but I'm happy with how the character turned out! There's a specific style I'm trying to figure out (it would be easier if I could nail down what I wanted), and this piece turned out the closest to what I had in mind. --

This one was just cute. I didn't realize I messed up the hands but I can't unsee it. And now, neither can you. --

This one is just neat. --

Some friends and I decided to do a coordinated attack on a random account, and I had a couple days to pick at it while waiting for the last couple people to finish their drawings. I actually learned a lot about polish this way. Too bad I'm too impatient to sit on bit drawings like that again :P --

This might be my favorite composition-wise. I'd love to revisit the style again some time and see if I can expand on it. --

At this point I realized I was burned out on big fancy backgrounds. Oops! Still cute, just not what I had in mind. Also go read Scarlet Hunt. It's really good. Small gore warning though... --

That's all for now, but Art Fight is only half over, so I'll be sure to show off more art later!

[animatedaf]

It’s that time of year again, time to look over the last twelve months of creative productivity! This was my busiest year for freelance animation EVER, with six projects all pretty much one after the other, some of which lasted several months! For the first time in over ten years animation actually felt like my main job! Read on for full details on each month (with links to things in bold)!

January:

I kickstarted the year with an attempt to keep myself busy (haha) by coming up with weekly personal illustrations to work on while livestreaming. This included a couple based on childhood toys, followed by fan art of games I was playing at the time. 

I also started my first freelance gig of the year about visiting a recycling center for Love Essex, which was finished and released in early Feb.

February:

I continued the weekly art streams (though I did skip one week while I was wrapping up the animation work) that included more Balan Wonderworld fan art and another nostalgia trip based around old TV game show Fun House which was seen and approved by Pat Sharp himself!

I also made some Valentine’s day silliness for CherryT and with her help also created this ridiculous Art Data-Blast video featuring all of my art over the years with a 90′s TV inspired intro.

March:

A big turning point for my livestreams arrived here when I decided to create a PNGTuber using Veadotube Mini! I livestreamed the majority of my experimentation and process and the cutdown videos about it became some of my biggest hits on YouTube yet! Going forward I would now use this animated avatar instead of a webcam, though this would actually end up being the last month of the year that I’d have any time to livestream because...

April:

..April would be the start of one of the biggest projects: six one-minute animated shorts for the Scottish Illegal Money Lending Unit about the dangers of loan sharks. This month was spent mostly storyboarding most of the films and completing the first one.

At the same time concepts were being developed for another six-minute piece of animation that I would need to juggle alongside the above project over the coming months!

I should also mention here life-wise I changed my daily job from working in a cinema to...working in a smaller, closer to home cinema!

May:

This month was mostly spent storyboarding for the second big project and waiting around for approval while the Loan Shark project was put on hold, so while I had a bit of spare time I gave my website a new lick of paint (including some new art of old characters) and made several illustrations including my favorite Eurovision 2022 act (now my most popular Tumblr post ever for some reason!), joining in on the Catoon Network CMYK art fad, and fan art of a fellow PNGTuber. I was also commissioned by Jadypie to create some cute animal Twitch emotes!

June:

After two pieces of quick art including another obscure game character and another excuse to draw Amy Rose, me and CherryT took a couple days away to visit the theme park Alton Towers, which I made a travel vlog about! 

The 2nd film for the Stop Loan Sharks series was completed this month and this was when the 2nd big project was given the official go ahead! The six-and a half minute long film has yet to be released and might end up staying in the private sector but it was a pre-birth social work training video for Essex County Council  with a similar subject matter and art style to the Annabelle’s Journey film I made last year. Clips of it can be seen in my latest showreel.

I also drew these guys for some reason.

July:

This month was almost exclusively knuckling down to get the un-released film fully animated. Much like the Annabelle film this was a massive amount of hand-drawn animation squeezed into just over one month! I also made time to do this commission for PCWzrd.

August:

With that long, time-consuming project out of the way it was time to jump back into the Loan Shark films. Two were completed in April and June but I still had four to go, so this month and most of September was day-to-day animating again!

September:

I was getting these Loan Shark films done at a rate of roughly 10 days per film, though the last one took a little longer as it was yet to be storyboarded until now. This project was finally complete midway through the month and released near the end!

Somewhere in the middle of all this I managed to fit in some livestreams of the Sonic Fan Games Expo and some reactions to some gaming events.

In the last week of the month I worked on a pretty exciting commission that I need to stay tight-lipped about for now!

October:

This month was started by wrapping up the above commission and jumping into another, thankfully much shorter 1 minute animation for the English Stop Loan Sharks company that has also not yet seen the light of day, but you can see a short clip of it in my latest showreel. As soon as that was done another big project approached!

November:

This freelance gig started at the end of October and lasted all through November and up until the middle of December! This one has released in January 2023, a short film called What a Waste! 

There was a break at the end of November when me and CherryT went to Birmingham for a few days to finally go to a concert we booked back in early 2020 that kept getting delayed!

Mid-month I also quickly doodled up my OC a couple times.

Above: the moment I finished an 8-week long non-stop project on a to do list!

December:

What a Waste ended up taking longer than I anticipated at around seven or eight weeks total, most likely because it’s quite unlike anything I have done before. After what felt like roughly nine months of almost non-stop animating the last half-month of the year was spent last-minute Christmas shopping and finally chilling out a bit, including going to a local video games expo for the weekend! The last piece of art I did this year was for the Newgrounds Secret Santa.

That was an intense year! I can’t wait till you get to see the stuff that’s not out there yet and in terms of 2023 I do already have a couple things queued up for January so we’ll see how it goes I guess!

Previous years: 2021 - 2020 - 2019 - 2018 - 2017 - 2016

[dashawfrostart]

Long Time No Talk - And This Week In "Time & Again"

... I am not gonna lie, it's a been a while. I really stopped posting virtually everywhere for a few months - that is, undoubtedly, because of my remarkably introverted tendencies when it comes down to posting on social. But for those, who know me, this should not come as a surprise.

Some endeavours we take sound awesome at first - but afterwards the spark simply dims, and you don't feel like that was a nice idea anymore. It happened to me a few times - and let's be honest: this happens to everyone of us from time to time! Maybe it has to do with the amount of effort we didn't anticipate, or maybe the idea just doesn't sound as exciting over time, for some tend to lose interest quickly. Blogging hasn't been easy for me in my twenties and later on.

I feel bad about it though. Because this is something that I really wanted to do. I'm an old-schooler after all 😎. But truth be told, it's never too late to start over or continue! And my writing practice makes it an important undertaking. Just as I've already mentioned in my very first blog post: my goal and the purpose of this website hasn't changed. Some people I know in real life are fascinated with my manner of writing - although I myself am not particularly convinced. I think I have a lot of room for improvement. It's all pretty subjective though. But I don't like to look back, to dwell on the past, and to hang on to whatever has been lost. Instead - even though I might stumble on my way - I will go further and press on. Giving up is not my motto. I am still very eager to practice writing - and I will do it here.

And lately I even came up with a nice way to fulfill that wish.

On to the important topic now! To make this place a bit more lively and significantly less boring, I decided to take on a great responsibility! And I've been thinking about that for a while already. I'm going to start posting once-per-week posts with updates on how the work with "Time & Again" is coming along. I guess I could share that with the rest of you. Mind you: I've never been a big fan of spoilers and I didn't like to show off the unfinished pieces and WIPs very much... Although my views recently started to shift. I think I might be okay with that now. Let this be my little devlog, just like the videogame developers would've put it - but about my graphic novel instead of a game! (the game might still be coming out... It's still in my dreams, but who knows? Opportunities might suddenly turn up, right?!)

And just to tease you a little more... There's A LOT going on with "Time & Again" right now ;) You think I disappeared from the face of the Earth without a reason, or because I'm lazy, or because another one wave of typical for me "social networks disappreciation" covered me up?!.. No, you're wrong! 🤪 I've been, indeed, working very hard on the continuation of my strange story that will sure take quite an unexpected - for some - turn of events.

To avoid turning this post into a sudden wall of text - although if you're here reading my notes AND my graphic novel, then I'm sure you must not have anything against walls of text, you know what I mean, right? 😁 - for this first post from "This Week In 'Time & Again'" series I'll just briefly mention what I've done so far.

As some of you remember, Chapter 4 broke off on a rather uncertain note.

There is a reason to it. The next 4 chapters are going to be somewhat different in style and feel. It's an experimental graphic novel after all.

Over the past few months, I spent a lot of time polishing the script for the rest of the story, trying to straighten the paths that have been bent and didn't make the creation look good. In the last few days, I worked diligently on making the page templates for Chapter 5, and arranged the text lines, and speech bubbles.

At this point of time, the storyboard for Chapter 5 is 100% complete, and now I just need to fill all the pages up with the artworks! Simple and exciting!.. I perhaps made it sound extra simple. But really, it has never been easy. Making all these artworks takes time - sometimes a lot of time. One really should not underestimate the work of artist, because it's a tough job (that sometimes hardly ever pays 🤪). Right now everything goes well and quite fast. I'm not competing against time, I'm just working on it continuously and dedicatedly with a minimum of distractions as possible (still play Doom mods tho XD). So I'm getting there!

So far, I'm aiming to release Chapter 5 at around Christmas/New Year's. That said though, since I'm planning on complete overhaul of the design elements for the rest of the websites and social prior to release of Chapter 5 - for the new concept requires that! - I honestly might not make it in time. But the time will tell. No reason to plan way too far ahead and attempt divinations before starting the main part of the work 😁 So I'll just see how it goes.

That's it for today, folks! See you next week with another one - hopefully larger and more substantial! - post from "This Week In 'Time & Again'" series! Take care! 👋 (and prepare yourselves to be spooked 😈, heheheh!)

[jaijaiwilkinsonslifedrawingblog]

Tuesday 10th January 2023

3 minute sketches:

Experimentation 1: I tried to do a piece with softened, smudged chalk. However, I didn't like the way it turned out and wouldn't want to try again.

Experimentation 2: I wanted to practice an etching style that I've been trying out in other areas of my artistic practices. I wanted to see if I could apply it to life-drawing. I think the using pencil didn't have the desired effect of the style I hoped, neither did it sit right with me for an enlarged image. I think in the future it could work if I practised it a bit more, and used a different media. I also needed to include the environment as it looked incomplete.

Experimentation 3: I focused on getting the background this time; the area of the figure I worked on I worked the the environment around it at the same time.

Painting: I was figuring out a style I liked through a sequence of images. I liked the blue bodied clown, and set it at the style for the rest of the paintings.

Set style:

20 minute painting: I used an orange background as it's a complementary colour to blue, and wanted to bring the clown to be the main focus. I also used a hit of green to make the red stand out as well.

Final Painting: I wanted to have a Goya and Francis Bacon inspired piece as the model was dressed as a clown, and I wanted to create something unnerving to the viewer. I intentionally created drips running down the painting and titled it 'The Crying Clown'.

Key points to take away from today's lesson:

Try and draw in a way that is opposite to what is practical e.g. draw from bottom to apex instead of the other way round as apex is the last thing we see.

We look at objects in the middle but tend to draw the outlines of them instead.

Focus on the attitude towards the piece not the perfection of it.

We understand space perfectly - only see it if we acknowledge it (direct vision to it)

Do environment right away if possible/with section of figure focused on otherwise it will look incomplete and/or separated if environment is not there.

[jezfletcher]

1000 Albums 2022: Albums #25-16

I'm a bit late in writing up my Top Albums this year, but it being the first day of 2023, I thought it's probably a good time to look back on the year that was in music, and start writing up my top albums. As has been the case since 2016 (wow, 7 years of this now), Sam and I have listened to over 1000 albums this year, and I've distilled the very best of 2022's music into just a top 25. For the stats-curious: we hit 1032 albums in total this year, of which 938 were actually released in 2022 (that's 91% brand new music). That added up to over 11,000 individual tracks, and almost 717 hours of unique music (that's about an entire month listening 24 hours a day). My Spotify Wrapped said I listened for more than twice this when you take into account relistening and so-on—so it's undoubtedly a big undertaking. In addition to our 2022 albums, we listened to 2 "throwback" albums from previous years each week, and managed complete retrospectives of four different artists' work. This year, the lucky artists were Van Dyke Parks (including the various albums for other artists that he produced and arranged for), Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tracy Chapman, and Blur. Of these, the absolute standout was Buffy Sainte-Marie, who was a revelation to me. For two sides of a fascinating artist, check out My Country Tis Of Thy People You're Dying, one of the best bist of protest folk I've ever heard, or the psychedelic folk rock of Sweet September Morning. Amazing stuff. Anyway, we're not really here to talk about that, but I can't resist putting a little call-out for Buffy. We're here to count down my Top Albums of 2022. I've gone fom 25 to 16 in this post. Tomorrow, I'll count down 15-5, leaving the top 5 for a big reveal in a few days. But lets get started...

25. Bitch - Bitchcraft (experimental queer pop)

Bitchcraft by Bitch

Kicking off the writeups this year we have this pot-pourri of experimental and less-experimental queer electropop from self-styled poet-witch Bitch. It has all the anarchy of true punk, laced with screaming electronic hooks and a consistent use of Bitch's iconic violin. But she also turns in soulful, melodic ballads like Another Wound, which may be the best piece of music on the album. It all makes for a rich and varied experience, always with a very unique and personally engaging world view. As an iconic song from the album though, which represents all the wonderful genre-smashing, I can't go past "Hello Meadow!". You'll like it if you want: Lindsey Stirling, only weirder, and queer rather than fundamentalist Christian.

24. Lack the Low - God-Carrier (avant-pop)

God-Carrier by Lack The Low

Björk had an excellent album this year; it ended up #34, so just missing out on a write-up. But instead we have Lack the Low, an Australian artist who obviously owes some inspiration to the darker parts of Björk's oeuvre. I heard the excellent The Sharpest Knife playing one Saturday morning on our local community radio station, and it immediately thrust God-Carrier on to my listen-list for the following week. She does wonderfully atmospheric electro-prog with a sense of build to her tracks that drives towards an often ecstatic, cathartic finish. While The Sharpest Knife was my introduction, I think the best track is the opener, Rushlight. You'll like it if you want: independent Aussie artists taking barbershop in strange new directions.

23. Kae Tempest - The Line Is A Curve (spoken-word poetry)

kaetempest · Priority Boredom

One of our finest modern poets, Kae Tempest brought back the punch of their spoken-word outings like Let Them Eat Chaos and Everybody Down, leaving behind what I found more introspective and downbeat in their previous 2019 album. This pushes Tempest back into the upper echelons of the year with The Line Is a Curve, another collab between Tempest's gripping delivery with Dan Carey's electronic production—together they provide one of the most potent electronic albums of the year, while Tempest proves once again why they are lyrically such a powerhouse. Hard to single out a track to represent the whole album—its potency comes from the accumulation of the whole—but I've shared here Priority Boredom which I feel is a fabulous entry to the album. You'll like it if you like: contemporary spoken-word poetry or modern electronica. You'll love it if you like: both of the above.

22. Murder By Death - Spell/Bound (gothic country)

Spell/Bound by Murder By Death

Atmospheric indie rock by way of That Haunted Gorge Where All Those Cowboys All Mysteriously Disappeared Exactly 10 Years Ago Tonight, Murder By Death provide a wonderfully dark take on modern Americana. This is all about creating a mood with their sophisticated rock, lashed with country elements. It's music for driving at night through West Texas, or for that hipster bar in Asheville that hasn't quite shaken off its bluegrass roots entirely. This is an album I could absolutely listen to end-to-end and consider it a singular experience. It's hard to single out something again—this is about the whole journey, not the sights along the way—but I'll go with Never Be which I think is possibly the most accessible, even if it's not that emblematic of the whole album. You'll like it if you like: country, but only kinda secretly.

21. Telenova - Stained Glass Love (indie pop)

Stained Glass Love by Telenova

Easily my highest-rated EP of the year, this 5-track outing gets a big boost from having a Track of the Week for the title track, and then following it up with another a few weeks later when we heard the full EP, this time for Silver Lining, which is a wonderfully melancholy bit of downtempo pop that shifts its way through various harmonic peculiarities. As always when this kind of jewel-studded EP appears, you fear that it's just the precursor to a bigger debut album which will seem less novel when it's just "this EP stretched out to 45m long". But presuming that this is a stand-alone, it's a great one. I've highlighted the title track here, but you can spare the 21m to listen to the whole thing. You'll like it if you like: anything of modern indie pop, or 90s downtempo

20. Mice Parade - lapopọ (post shoegaze)

lapapọ by Mice Parade

I came across Mice Parade for the first time at the 2008 Sydney Festival, where I completely eschewed their show, but was waiting outside the Spiegeltent waiting a different performance while they were on inside. I was rapt by their fascinating blend of dreamy shoegaze and complex polyrhythms, even if the sound was muted by the canvas between me and them. Fortunately, since then, while I've not managed to catch them live, I've fallen in love with their albums, and their latest might be their best. It has the same hypnotic drawl of Adam Pierce's vocals (an anagram of "Mice Parade", you'll note), with fluid motivic guitar riffs and multi-layered drum-patterns. This is an album that builds up over time, but I have to call out Eisa Dancers which starts with this ethereal riff (possibly on hammered dulcimer, or on a koto) and builds waves, wending in and out of the dream-like otherworldiness. You'll like it if you like: a novel take on jangly indie rock.

19. Keston Cobblers Club - Alchemy (twee folk)

I've recently very much become attached to the music reviews site At The Barrier, which does a great job of unearthing music that I find nowhere else—they also have a particular focus on various kinds of folk, and this is one of those albums this year which comes solely from ATB. It's an eclectic album, jumping between variations of folk pop, switching out singers and showing off their multi-instrumental prowess. I could call out quite a few song here—Jupiter has a wonderful expansive space-folk sound (is that a thing? it should be), Rigmarole brings in tuba and accordion for a kind of indie-trad sound, Tarantula has a musical theatricality to it to bring the album home. I might just go with one of the early tracks Find My Way, which sits a little more in the centre of everything. You'll like it if: you're not afraid of a bit of a trad folk sound, but still enjoy pop songwriting.

18. Frank Turner - FTHC (alt punk)

Frank Turner is a little hard to classify, because he definitely comes from a punk background, but now turns to a kind of raucous singalong pub rock—he can also pull together a genuinely excellent bit of pop like his satirical Make America Great Again from 2018. Here, he's in more of a heavier, angrier, shoutier style for the most part, even when he sticks with pop tropes like in Haven't Been Doing So Well, or the show-ending Farewell To My City. The standout track for me here though is the wonderful Miranda, a story about reconciling with his father after she came out as trans. You'll like it if you like: hard indie rock, or punk with a soft heart.

17. bis - Systems Music for Home Defence (electropunk)

Systems Music For Home Defence by bis

A great collection of eclectic, shouty electropop that takes the kind of 80s sound back to its post-punk root, and is willing to have fun along with way. I love music that doesn't take itself too seriously (my common refrain is that you should be able to tell that the band is having fun), and this has this feeling all over it. Bis has only released about an album every 5 years or so since 2000, although they've been around since the mid-90s (and broken up then reformed at least once), and you can feel like they're pretty happy just doing what they want—nothing is forced in this album. They've got nothing to prove, and they can do the things that work for them. My pick here is the opening track Lucky Night, which has a pointed satire to it, as well as a super-catchy indie pop sound. You'll like it if you like: 00s electropunk, after big beat went off in a weird direction.

16. Death's Dynamic Shroud - Darklife (slushwave)

Darklife by death's dynamic shroud

This is a bit of a monster, both in terms of its length, and its aggressive, spiky electronica. It takes some of the massive symphonic sound of someone like Roly Porter, but adds synthpop elements, along with the kind of knowing deconstruction of hyperpop. I relistened to this on a drive between Sydney and Canberra and I realised that I'd probably massively underrated it earlier in the year (even though it won my Album of the Week the week it was released). But it's an album that you really need to experience in its entirety to get its full impact. That being said, there's a nice sample of the whole in the epic, progressive Messe de E-102, which gets my nod here. You'll like it if you like: Wagner

[acaiis]

hndgbhgdjfffff them,,,,,,

[kyotakumrau]

ROCK AND READ 098 SALUS -interview- #1 Kyo

"I'm definitely fond of eros, beauty and a decadent worldview, such things might've been reflected in sukekiyo since before."

There's no question that sukekiyo is formed with Kyo in its centre, it's a band with Kyo as its axis, but how come it's a band that distorted/perverted and that beautiful/pure..? Kyo, who said it all just happened naturally, what did he want to portray in SALUS, and in sukekiyo?

Text: Yukinobu Hasegawa

Translation: kyotaku (if you notice any mistakes, typos etc give me a shout!)

ROCK AND READ 098 is available on Amazon JP here!

profile & information

born February 16th. blood type B. vocalist of DIR EN GREY as well as of formed in 2013 sukekiyo.

-- Although the additional March show in 2020 from sukekiyo TOUR2020 DRIPPIN' got cancelled, songwriting continued as usual. DIR EN GREY is also busy with preproduction. When it got to the situation you couldn't play concerts, could you easily change your feelings towards creative activities?

京  You write a song/melody, or if you have a song/melody you can add song/singing. That's it. sukekiyo has now about 17 songs (in stock). I have interim singing for all of them. From there we had to decide which ones to release this time. With DIR EN GREY as well, now when songs came in I added interim singing. I was just doing what can be done, just that.

-- With sukekiyo, do you often start working on a new piece with a different theme etc, like once you've done one thing next you move in a different direction?

京  Instead of thinking of wanting to do something, it's more like wanting to upgrade. We don't talk to each other so much, each band member has their own different ideas, the themes/tasks themselves. Me myself, I'm not trying to give myself a huge 'power up'. This time we also didn't have a particular course/path we wanted to follow. There are still song we haven't done [to our best potential], there's still feeling like we haven't done enough in that path, so we haven't tried anything new.

-- When we talked last time for RR (087) I asked you what kind of music you tune your antenna to, you said you listen to a lot of old 80s songs.

京  Yeah, basically I like it. But recently I'm not listening to anything. Even if I'm not adding any new data, there's already a lot of stuff inside of me that I feel like I haven't digested/absorbed in yet. That's why it feels completely natural. But if I feel like I don't have any ideas or I'd like to add a bit of new data I will listen to and watch various things more.

-- So in order to create you didn't need to work on input?

京  That's right, in the end since the pandemic started I've been only buying toys and sneakers (laughing).

-- I see (laughing). About your new release (SALUS), I've just interviewed Takumi. It seems that he got some ideas from you and based on that he created the sound/music. What kind of ideas did you give him?

京  sukekiyo already has many Showa era pop style songs, from among them, how to say this... I wanted to try singing a sparkly Showa era pop style song that would have even more nostalgic elements. Could we use this or not, how would it turn out if we made it as sukekiyo and I tried singing. I've made a request to Takumi, would ya try making somethin like that for me? There was a lot of time. When I tried singing, it ended up as a pretty interesting song. We have 17 other songs, when we started discussing which song should end up next on the next release, we all kind of agreed this one had the biggest impact/kick, so we went with it. So it was quite experimental.

-- The term Showa era pop came up, which years do you listen to the most?

(*Showa era lasted between 1929-1989)

京  The truth is, I don't listen to it so much. Somehow you feel what that era was like, for example we somehow know, like 'this sound is very 90s'. That's about how much I listen to it.

-- In the past there were many music programs on TV and many shops were playing Showa era pop, even if we didn't pay attention to it, it's music we just ended up listening to.

京  Exactly, that's how.

-- You said that sukekiyo has a lot of chic Showa era pop songs, do you see it as one of the important roots of the band?

京  Yeah, the number of this kind of songs at concerts increased, many times they serve as an accent or a special point, so I kinda wanted to have more.

-- In sukekiyo shows, and this is completely my personal view, I think you give off all of Showa culture including front and back /pour out. Thinking that you had an underground butohdancing, you also sing Showa pop songs and sometimes you also have this (old small bit rundown but very homey bars in the outskirts) feel. And you also use the old style tv noise in your stage lighting effect. Also the sense of lighting, is definitely not a gaudy style. It feels like a Showa recital of for example Chiaki Naomi.

京  That's true. And plus that, we also have digital elements, gothic elements, and the mix of all that is the most sukekiyo-like. That's why the song released now is just well divided. Things that make me feel nostalgic or videos/images and commercials that feel like that, they really suit sukekiyo well. They would definitely not suit DIR EN GREY. That's why starting from earlier, before sukekiyo's performance we have played a parody of popular old commercials. We're a band that's really into that. We're not just an underground band, but I think we constantly want to poke this subtle line of is it a joke or is it serious. Like 'is it okay to laugh here...?'

-- As someone who remembers drinking not in Showa era's Kabukicho, but in Shinjuku Golden Gai (laughing), I always get those nostalgia stabs. (*when he sees those parody videos)

京  Aah, they played them there for sure. On the topic of Shinjuku, I'd really like homesexual men to listen to it. There are many homosexual men who love Nakamori Akina.

-- Ah, true. A bit before I've interviewed Kinashi Noritake. Mr. Kinashi has a song he's singing together with Matsuko Deluxe and Mitz Mangrove. When we were talking about the recording apparently Mrs Mitz said 'I will become Akina'.

(*Matsuko Deluxe is a drag queen and a popular TV persona; same as Mitz Mangrove, Kinashi is a comedian)

京  Ah, of course. Exactly, Nakamori Akina has many devoted fans.

-- I wonder why is that? In the old Truck Yarou (Truck Guys, 1975-79) series the truck decoration had either Kudo Shizuka or Nakamori Akina.

京  I also like Kudo Shizuka, but she has almost no fans among homosexual men. It's always Matsuda Seiko or Akina, for some reason.

-- The names of those two, Kinashi also said they were mentioned by the two queens.

京  I'm not surprised. I can understand Akina, she has that melancholic feel.

-- We can call it melancholy/grief, or she has this aura of an unhappy woman. It feels to me like a circumstances of a miserable woman.

京  Yup, you get hooked in. As an idol Matsuda Seiko doesn't have a dark side at all. I thought that was good. Kudo Shizuka has this bit of a yankee feel, I guess that's what makes the difference. But I do have a favourite era of songs. And also Yamaguchi Momoe, around the time close to her retirement, she was so cool to be able singing like that at her age. That also suits sukekiyo's worldview well.

-- The women of Showa era pop really left a strong impression.

京  Amazingly. But at that time there was no internet so we couldn't check anything. As an adult now when I search videos from that time on Youtube I found them so cool. When I go back and watch them I think they are very interesting.What convenient times we're in.

-- When having free time it would be fun to watch things like that, right?

京  Well, that's true. So we filmed the video for 'Candis', it is also styled like Showa era music tv programs. It came out quite interesting.

-- You made it as close to Showa era pop as you could.

京  Recently I'm watching some retro music videos. There are people who made their videos like this. But 'Candis' starts from the interview part. The previous artist's performance ends and there's announcement 'next is sukekiyo~!'. We start filming from there. Right now Mika is in the middle of editing so I hope you will look forward to it.

-- When talking to Takumi about the song idea did you already have the image of the lyrics?

京  I get an image as soon as I hear one chorus of the song. I wrote as it all came with an image of one woman. The part of the lyrics with 'naite naite naite (cry)' is the same as I roughly sang in the beginning. There was nothing else I liked more than that so I left it. I'm usually most into those first rough lyrics I sing as the first impression, so it feels really natural.

-- When we talked at the early era of sukekiyo, you said sukekiyo very often depicts woman's nature/destiny. With the fact that 'naite naite naite' came up as the first impression, you are thinking about many different things when you sing as sukekiyo.

京  Who knows.

-- Empathy is very important in singing. With sukekiyo are you just becoming a totally different Kyo to the usual one?

京  Naah, how to say it, it's really something that comes naturally. It's not divided.

-- People definitely can have several personalities and be multidimensional. Just because you're a guy doesn't mean your personality or way of thinking would be 100%/pure guy, that would be weird.

京  I don't have a, for men it would be like this, for women it would be like this, thing. I don't see a distinction. I don't know if there's any relation, but when I get a song and an image of a woman comes up naturally, I will write and sing the lyrics like that.

-- I read that Showa pop lyrics writers etc said when writing lyrics about woman's emotions,

you do something close to profiling thinking what kind of life the woman who would become the main heroine, would be leading.

京  I understand [this kind of approach]. It's easier to think in detail about things like settings and write. Like this woman would be riding in a car like this. But I don't do that either. But isn't it completely the opposite with DIR EN GREY, how the lyrics feel? Isn't the me who has those two different ways of thinking totally dangerous? Someone very effeminate and with great viciousness, someone with no in between will be dangerous, right? When talking about having ideas naturally. It might be close to a psychopath (laughing).

-- You have without realizing multiple personalities inhibiting you (laughing).

京  When you have a psychotic break various different personalities will come out, right? And then you say 'that wasn't me' (laughing).

-- (laughing) But there is a crying woman in the lyrics of Candis.

京  There is, right? By the way, the titles of songs like this all come from Drag Queen names. 'Valentina' is like that. 'dorothy' is [from the perspective of] a homosexual woman. I deliberately create titles from a place with no boundary between men and women.

-- When you're singing, I think for sure you must want the song to reach someone, for someone to get the message. How about with 'Candis'?

京  I'm most interested in the reaction of the homosexual men when they listen to the song. But I want many people to listen to it, naturally. Recently young people don't know Showa era pop, so I'd like them to listen. To see that even in this era things like that are being done. Although we're a band.

-- In 'Furesaseru' even more wretched/tragic thing happens than in 'Candis'.

京  Aah, yeah.

-- A woman who is selling her body is questioning herself about her existence and feelings, if she's right or wrong. But there's a reality you can't deny. With a title 'furesaseru・let someone touch' for such story, you definitely went far depicting it.

京  We also released it as a demo tape, but I recorded the singing again and music atmosphere also did a quite 180 turn. But the image of the lyrics didn't change so much, it wasn't possible to change the text. That was also natural. Somehow, the dark and gloomy feeling came out, atmosphere of spacing out in a hotel. What came naturally from that became this song.

-- I think everyone will react to the word 'room 304'.

京  I'm doing things like that now and then. Something that only people who get it will get. The part in 'Candis' of 'kizu wa kireina hana ni naru・a wound will become a beautiful flower' comes from the old DIR EN GREY lyrics that I wrote. People who hear it will go 'huh? He's referring to his own lyrics?' I'd be happy if they reacted to this with 🤭.

-- You're being playful. Although the lyrics content is very serious. When I listened to 'Furesaseru' after 'Candis' I could only see a figure of one woman who is falling (morally, becoming depraved).

京  That really matches well other sukekiyo songs, the before and after.

-- Do you think you're letting out the overflowing inside of you sorrow, darkness and conflicts of one woman?

京  I wonder. There's also that I like this kind of worldview. Aren't there lots of old movies and dramas that are pretty grimy? That's the strongest impression I have. It would really match perfectly if you for example watched old movies with Momoi Kaori. With love and madness being both mixed together or the image of a woman who looks good with a cigarette. I also love the series 'Gokudou no tsuma/onna tachi' (Yakuza Wifes/Ladies, 1986~). Rather than the usual yakuza movie with men, that series is so good. They are depicting women's nature, the fights between women or their ugly side. It seems that I like this kind of worldview. These kinds of things come out naturally. I'm not really watching normal ones with happy stories. Or rather, I'm not interested. Ah, and I love the old drama with Mikami Hiroshi ('Anata dake mienai' 1992) with a three split personalities theme. Because of that I asked Mr.Hiroshi to sing with me for a collaboration for VITIUM (focus Collaboration with Mikami Hiroshi included on disc 2 of the first edition). A guy who becomes a woman, the impact this drama made really stayed very vivid. And, there's the old erotic books that were thrown away at riversides*, isn't that oddly erotic? There's something so graphic/raw there. Recently, there's nothing with the same kind of feeling. It's not eroguro (erotic and grotesque), but it's tied. It matches sukekiyo really well.

(*erotic books discarded at the riverside are supposed to be Showa scenery that people have a nostalgic feeling about...)

-- Does it match sukekiyo, or is it your own desire or what you are?

京  No, I don't see this in a sexual way. I see it as an art. Like being drawn to it. A woman tied up in a Japanese room with tatami... there's something beautiful about it, I see it with the eyes like that. I'm definitely fond of eros, beauty and a decadent worldview. Such things might have been reflected in sukekiyo since before. The poledancers from that time or the signs in the neon town are also nice. I can feel the darkness with just that.

-- Creeper that will be only included on the limited edition is a song about woman obsessed with plastic surgery.

京  Something like that.

-- The struggle of wanting to become beautiful, feelings about deciding to have plastic surgery, and the fight with her true feelings if it's right or not. The way you portray it doesn't feel like a song.

京  I guess. The song itself was also the most crazy one, so we had to include the latest sounds giving strong scent of German-like atmosphere. I felt it was something for the hardcore fans only so it will be only included on the limited edition. I'm really into that song.

-- It's incredible how your voice changes colour. From the side of the doctor who performs the plastic surgery, to looking down at the society, to the patient who lost her feelings, the way you depict things changes with each scene.

京 That's also something natural for me. If I thought about it a bit more I could answer various questions, but as the years went by I stopped thinking about it. In the past, I had various things like the sound coming from the right here, rotate the position here or sing this way here. But as the years went by I let it all become natural.

-- Because, in the end, it is better?

京  I think it is. I don't mind if it's all perfect and polished, but if it's a half assed job it'd end up very immature. It's not like it was intentional like 'I really want you to listen to the lyrics here' or 'this part is really good' and so on. Things like this are also that, done in a more natural way. Singing effects are put in by band members in a way that matches the song, so I can't say anything on that. They always create something better than I imagined. Songs written by utA very often change their image to grotesque (グロっと?) in the final stage so I'm really looking forward to them every time.

-- After asking you about the lyrics, I cannot see an image of happy woman at all. By the way, the release title is 'SALUS'. Isn't it the exact opposite of the meaning?

京  Nope, I thought it would be interesting to attach a name like this to such desperate work (theme/message wise). But for the fans who will listen to it it shoud also be a relief/salvation.

-- SALUS is the female god of health, right?

京  There must be some fans who'd be like 'I've been waiting for this' even with such lyrics or songs, so I decided on [name] like that to help them even a little in these difficult times.

-- There might be some people who while listening will think 'I'm not this miserable' and cheer up?

京  There are many fans who seem to understand even if they can't trully sympathize. And even though I'm writing lyrics like that there are surprisingly many male fans, of sukekiyo. I don't understand why. They might like the music, or they might be guys who like the effeminate lyrics. But I'm glad we have many male fans.

-- There must be something, like one more feeling inside that drives me. With the lyrics that made us see the scene clearly, we can see crystal clear a woman's personality or even her view of life in a 4, 5 minute long song.

京  If you listen to the song while reading the lyrics it might be like that. This time it might be quite pronounced. Or it might be also that it's narrowed down to 3 songs. With an album it'd be a bit more spread out.

-- In December you will hold a tour 'tonari no hekiko (Hekiko/peculiar girl next to you) -shikkoku no gi-'.

京   Yup, in Osaka, Nagoya and Tokyo.

-- Of course I have checked the venues and dates. But what's with this tour name? (laughing)

京  Nothing really, it's the worldview. I think many people who like this kind of worldview are distorted/twisted. Normal, when we say normal, once you say 'I like sukekiyo' you're not normal anymore. That's why I'm pointing at fans, the kid who stands next to you is the same as you. Everyone is the same race/kind. After all everyone is weird. And recently I heard there was a fan(s) who went to DIR EN GREY shows after getting into sukekiyo. I'm not sure about their reaction after seeing DIR EN GREY (laughing). But I'd like various people to listen to us. If those people could listen to me without making any distictions, not see me as DIR EN GREY's vocalist, that would make me happy.

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 59: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Theory of Mind

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 59: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Theory of Mind. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 59 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today we’re getting enthusiastic about whether you’re getting enthusiastic about theory of mind. But first, our most recent bonus episode is on translation in fiction – mostly translating between human languages and non-human languages but all kinds of translation.

Gretchen: You can get access to this translation episode about some books we’ve been reading recently and 50 other bonus episodes by becoming a patron at patreon.com/lingthusiasm. Here’s a bit of a preview into the books we talked about.

Lauren: We talked about Semiosis by Sue Burke, and A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, as well as The Devil Comes Courting by Courtney Milan. And, Gretchen, you have read Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin.

Gretchen: I have finally gotten around to reading Native Tongue, which has been much recommended to me.

Lauren: A classic piece of linguistic sci-fi.

Gretchen: You don’t have to have read any of these books beforehand. We don’t provide plot spoilers, although we’ll talk about some of the things in the setting. It’s fun whether you’ve read any of them or not at all. You might end up with some new things to read.

Lauren: You can get access to that episode and all of our bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, I’m gonna run an experiment on you.

Gretchen: Okay, I like experiments.

Lauren: Excellent. This one involves a lot of a set up, but it’s great because you can do it. If you are listening along, you can also do the experiment along with us.

Gretchen: Great! What’s our set up?

Lauren: We have Sally and Anne.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: Sally has a basket. Anne has a box. Sally has a marble – Sally with the basket – and she puts her marble into the basket. Then she goes out for a walk. Sally’s not here. But we’ve got a basket with a marble in it.

Gretchen: Sally’s not here. We’ve got her basket with the marble in it. Okay.

Lauren: We’ve got a box, and Anne is still there. Anne takes the marble out of the basket and puts it in the box.

Gretchen: So, now we’ve got a marble in a box.

Lauren: We’ve got the marble in the box. Sally comes back, and Sally wants to play with the marble. Where is Sally going to go to get her marble?

Gretchen: I’m going to deduce – based on the fact that when Sally left the room, she left the marble in the basket – she probably still thinks the marble is in the basket because she’d have no reason to assume that things would’ve changed, and so she’s gonna try the basket first because she doesn’t know that Anne has moved it.

Lauren: That is a perfectly reasonable deduction to make. You are a veritable Sherlock Holmes.

Gretchen: Thank you. Did I pass the test?

Lauren: You did. You completed what is known as the “theory of mind test” because you kept track of what you knew about the situation and what Sally knew about the situation and all the sneakiness that Anne had perpetrated with the marble.

Gretchen: But presumably at some period earlier in my life, when I was a very young child, I might not have passed this test.

Lauren: The ability to correctly articulate what you know about Sally’s likely chances of going to the basket or the box really doesn’t settle into being reliable until 3 or 4 years old – actually being able to articulate what you know about the state of other people’s thinking.

Gretchen: Which feels kind of late because 2-year-olds, 3-year-olds already have quite a bit of language in most cases, and yet this later reasoning about mental states and what different people know about different things comes along later.

Lauren: That’s what the theory of mind test seems to indicate. It is a bit more complex than this. This is something that was run for the first time 30 or 40 years ago. There’s been more work that’s tried to do versions that don’t involve language; they just involve looking. They show that toddlers, 15 months old, are actually maybe better at paying attention to the fact that the marble is in one place or another and what Sally might know a little bit better than they can articulate. It’s something about being able to put it into words that seems to be one of the challenges that takes until, as you say, well into language acquisition to be able to do this task consistently.

Gretchen: This task feels like something that some experimenter set up in a lab, and maybe they had puppets, or maybe they had two different experimenters, and these props feel very psychology-experiment-prop style to me.

Lauren: What do we have in the props department, yeah.

Gretchen: It’s funny. I was reading a different paper about these types of experiments, and there are other ways you can test for theory of mind. One of my either favourite or least favourite, depending on this, is – oh, shall I do it on you?

Lauren: Okay, yes.

Gretchen: I have a box. It’s a small cardboard box. The outside says “Kinder Chocolate Bars” – chocolate things.

Lauren: Great. I’m very compelled by this box.

Gretchen: We have our friend Gavagai, who is also in the room and sees this box with the chocolates on it. Gavagai is called out, suddenly, to leave to go do something else.

Lauren: Bye, Gav.

Gretchen: I open this box, and I show you that inside is not, in fact, chocolates, but it is pencils – coloured pencils.

Lauren: Okay, I was gonna say that’s a bit of a disappointment, but it’s something of a disappointment to me.

Gretchen: They’re coloured pencils, which is something more exciting than graphite pencils. But still, they’re not chocolates. Then I close the box up again, and it looks like it’s closed. Then our friend Gav comes back in the room.

Lauren: Hi, Gav.

Gretchen: What does Gav think is in the box?

Lauren: Well, I know that it’s pencils. But Gav wasn’t here when I saw that it was pencils. Gav still thinks it’s chocolates, and boy, are they in for a disappointment.

Gretchen: Yes, they are. You can do this about location of item, which is the Sally-Anne test, which is about location, or you can do it about identity of item – what’s in it.

Lauren: I have a colleague who’s done the theory of mind task with little stones instead of a marble, but then there’s a whole other twist where the stones end up being those little nuggets of chocolate that look like stones. I just feel like I would be confused by that point about who knows what about the state or location of this rock chocolate situation.

Gretchen: I remember I loved those stones as a child because it felt like you were gonna break a tooth on them, and then you would eat them.

Lauren: You could definitely do some fun false belief with someone about me eating dirt.

Gretchen: There’s also a fun one in this study where they found – and I don’t know where they got this object because I have not seen an object like this – they have this little toy that looks like a race car, like one of those cars that you “vroom vroom” on the table. But it turns out when you press a button on it, it turns into a pen. A pen-thing pops out. They’re trying to see does this person think it’s a race car, do they think it’s a pen. Somebody’s really going around in toy shops being like, “Okay, what here could be deceptive?”

Lauren: Keeping track of people’s knowledge states, as we’ve said, is something that takes a little bit of effort. Not all animals can necessarily do it. In fact, when we find animals that are really good at this, people get really excited. There are animals that are closely related to humans, like chimps seem pretty good at this. You can basically do a version of the location of an object thing, and the chimps are all over it. Also, ravens are really good at conceptualising where someone might be and what they might be doing. It’s one of those skills that isn’t just like – well, first of all, you get theory of mind and a bunch of other things, and then you get language. It’s not just an ingredient in the language cake. It’s just one of many skills that humans and animals closely related to humans seem to have but also is scattered throughout the animal kingdom.

Gretchen: Corvids are pretty smart, I guess. They can recognise people, so maybe they can also – if you feed them, they’ll become your friends.

Lauren: We’ve run a very classic theory of mind experiment at the top of this episode, but as we suggested, people have been pulling apart exactly what theory of mind is and how different people do different elements of it. It seems to be this complicated cluster of features around attention, attention-tracking, false belief, mental states, and being able to do all of this is part of being able to do the social element of language.

Gretchen: Because when you’re talking about language, you’re describing what other people have done. You’re thinking like, “Okay, why did this person behave this weird way this time?”, or “Why did this person do this thing to me?”, “Why can’t I get this?” You’re trying to figure out, well, it’s because this other person wants this thing even though that’s not what I want. Or it’s because this other person knows this thing even though it’s not what I know.

Lauren: Even just the process of asking a question, like, using language to interact with someone to try and get to an end goal and whether or not they are likely to have the right information that I need to get this question answered. Theory of mind is the having really good foundations on the house of language, and it’s part of why I’m always very zen when people talk about computers taking over the ability to do language. It’s like, well, first of all, a computer has to be able to keep track of their best guess of the knowledge state of everyone else in the interaction, and that’s not necessarily the same kind of programming task as figuring out sounds or morphemes or syntactic structures.

Gretchen: It’s interesting because it is a theory – not like the theory of gravity where scientists have hypothesised that minds might exist – but in the sense that, whenever we’re interacting with the world, we’re hypothesising that the people around us have intention behind what they’re doing, and they’re doing stuff for reasons. I have to hypothesise that you, Lauren, have a mind because I don’t actually have direct evidence that you have a mind. Maybe you have actually been Lauren-bot this entire time!

Lauren: True, true. I am operating under the same premise. I have my own theory. It’s not a shared theory, necessarily. We all have this internal idea that the people we’re interacting with in conversation are also doing the same mental calculation that we are.

Gretchen: I remember having this realisation that people have other mental states, and maybe they conceive of the world dramatically differently from how I do. Maybe this thing that I see that I call “red” isn’t actually what someone else is seeing even though they also call it “red.” I remember having this philosophical realisation when I was about 12 or so, and thinking, “How do we know anything that we’re seeing things.” And yet, even though I don’t have empirical evidence that you aren’t just an extremely sophisticated automaton – I mean, I do have a lot of empirical evidence, actually, because automatons aren’t that good yet – but we still manage to interact with people. We still manage to operate under a working theory that people do have minds and they are interactable with.

Lauren: People have drawn a link between this kind of cognitive foundation and the need for language by looking at the way early human ancestors learnt to socialise with each other. Instead of having small packs of humans, you ended up getting these larger and larger groups. Once you have these larger groups, you have to have some way of maintaining social cohesion that’s not just small-group dominance. Robin Dunbar is probably one the most famous proponents of this idea that language is a way of maintaining social cohesion and that you can keep a happy social relationship with more people essentially through gossip – gossip being one of the mechanisms that helped generate the need for language.

Gretchen: I mean, it’s useful to know can you trust this person because they were trustworthy last time or have they been going around and doing things that are not trustworthy or is this someone that someone else is willing to vouch for. There’s lots of reasons why language can help with cooperation.

Lauren: In the absence of being able to time travel, I quite like this theory of one of the ways that humans came to use language.

Gretchen: I’ve actually been thinking about Robin Dunbar’s theories for a different reason. Because he has this very famous 150-size social group number, which is the size of a lot of villages or small communities or small companies or small conferences. It’s the magic number for that kind of community. But also, there’s this other number that Dunbar and colleagues have also researched, which is four. That’s the number of people that conversations tend to max out at before they start splitting into smaller conversations.

Lauren: Ah, this makes a lot of sense when I think about small group chat at parties and the ebb and flow of when people join or leave conversations. I think that must also explain why trying to have all of your friends in one big video chat room at an online party is really stressful.

Gretchen: Exactly. This also shows up in fiction. It shows up in plays. It shows up in movies that people tend to max out at four conversation participants. The reason for this has to do with theory of mind, which is that we find it too cognitively exhausting to keep track of the mental states of too many people.

Lauren: In a specific conversation.

Gretchen: At once, yeah.

Lauren: So, I can vaguely keep track of, like, 200, 150 people in my social village, but in terms of the moment-to-moment what-do-you-know-about-the-story-I’m-telling, three or four people is enough for me to keep track of.

Gretchen: There’s a really interesting test of this which is that Dunbar and colleagues did an experiment where they asked people to talk about an absent third party and speculate about that absent third party’s mental states. When people were instructed to use that for their conversation, they tended to form one smaller conversational grouping, so maximum of three instead of maximum of four, when they were just asked to talk about what the absent third parties were doing but not what they were thinking.

Lauren: I’m deeply fascinated by – this is experiment is “Please come into this lab and gossip.”

Gretchen: Right. I don’t remember exactly how they set it up, but yeah, something about the maximum number of mental states that you can conceive of without getting too tired is around five, but that means four people because you’re also keeping track of, like, between you and me, we have three mental states. I’m thinking about me, I’m thinking about you, and then I’m also thinking about what you’re thinking about me.

Lauren: This is why the language that we use to talk about internal mental states does particularly interesting things in grammar. You begin to see theory of mind affect the way that we do grammar because verbs that express internal mental states act a bit differently to other verbs.

Gretchen: English actually has this interesting grammatical distinction between how we talk about mental state verbs versus action verbs in the present tense. We say something like, “I know,” “I like,” “I understand,” “I enjoy,” “I fear,” but for action verbs, we’re more likely to say something like, “I am running,” “I am walking,” “I am talking.”

Lauren: Oh, yeah, “I walk,” implies an “I walk every day” habit thing.

Gretchen: Right. Whereas “I know” doesn’t imply “I know every day.” There’s just this subtle distinction between how we talk about verbs in the present. In the past, we don’t do this. You can say “I liked” and “I walked,” and that’s the same, but in the present, we have this interesting distinction that’s made in English that isn’t necessarily made in other languages.

Lauren: That only really works for first person in English. It’s a bit weird to say this about other people, especially the person who you’re talking to.

Gretchen: It’s another thing that’s weird about verbs about mental states where it’s sort of weird for me to be like, “Lauren, you like cake.” I mean, I guess –

Lauren: I mean, you definitely have enough evidence to support that as a viable statement. I think in the context of us interacting, it would be fine, but it would very weird to say it to someone who you didn’t have that knowledge for.

Gretchen: If I just go up to someone in a coffee shop who’s eating cake and say, “You like cake,” it’d be like, “Excuse me, but who invited your opinion here?”

Lauren: I think this is one of the things I’ve had to learn in teaching over the years is it’s very easy for me to be like, “Well, you know this because we covered it in class last week.” I just assume that everything we covered in class is completely absorbed into your knowledge state.

Gretchen: You mean your students don’t have perfect downloads of every single, you know, audio file of your voice?

Lauren: In much the same way that we don’t assume that people have absorbed every single fact from Lingthusiasm when we bring them up a couple of years later.

Gretchen: Absolutely. You don’t retain this. It’s easy to be like, “I’ve told you once,” and like, “Yeah, that was years ago, I don’t remember everything that happened to me years ago.”

Lauren: It’s why you end up finding a lot of question forms for second person in verb paradigms when you’re trying to do this elicitation because it’s much more comfortable for people to reframe what you’ve said as a question.

Gretchen: I think when we’re used to doing this decontextualised form of grammar as linguists, we’re like, “Oh, yeah, okay, I can make a verb paradigm: I like; you like; he/she likes; we like; you-plural like; they like.” Yeah, fine, I can just make this little paradigm for me. But the social context in which you would use each of these forms is actually really different.

Lauren: I mean, now that we’ve said that I can definitely think of contexts where it would be fine to say it in English with a direct “You like” or “You know.” I think there’re definitely where it would be safe to say it to a child that you are very close to like, “I know you like toast. We ate toast for breakfast yesterday.” Lo and behold, they like toast. They just need to be reminded of that.

Gretchen: But even there you were like, “I know you like toast,” which is sort of not quite as committed to the statement as “You like toast.” Or if you wanna say to a dog or something like, “You want your dinner? Yes, I know you want your dinner. You’re gonna have your dinner. Here we go.” But it’s, I think, to say to an adult – I mean, maybe if I walk in on you in your office, and I’m like, “Oh, you’re busy. I’ll come back later.” Or like, “Oh, you’re reading. You’re on the phone. I’ll come back later.” There’re certainly contexts in which you could do it, but you have to do a lot more contextual set up.

Lauren: I love how much set up you had to do to get to that as a valid way of using an internal state verb directly at someone.

Gretchen: Whereas if I say, “Yeah, I know. I like cake.” This doesn’t require any set up. This is just the unmarked thing to do.

Lauren: This is why we separate out these verbs about internal mental states or “psych verbs” as they’re sometimes called and look at them separately to other verbs in English. Because talking about someone else’s mental state changes the way that we can use them in grammar.

Gretchen: Some psych verbs come in pairs. You can say “I like cake” or “Cake pleases me.” Or “I fear dogs,” “Dogs frighten me.” In both cases, you’re having the same relationship between the two entities, but the verb flips, which you don’t always see with actions. Sometimes you see it with actions like “I buy this from you,” “You sell it to me.” But it seems to be one of the things that happens with internal mental state verbs.

Lauren: They also tend to have more variation across languages and across cultures as to how you can use them.

Gretchen: Yeah. There’s a really interesting and subtle example of this in English and Spanish where in English it’s less common to say something like “You understand” with the meaning of “I infer you understand based on the evidence of you seeming to understand.” Whereas in Spanish, you have a verb that seems like it should correspond to English “understand,” but it is reasonable to use that verb to mean “I infer you understand because you’re asking really good questions” or “I infer you understand because you are making noises of comprehension and you’re nodding and so on.” It’s reasonable to say to someone “You understand” with the meaning, like, “It seems to me that you understand” or “I observe you to be understanding.”

Lauren: That is a subtle but important meaning distinction, I feel.

Gretchen: I heard this anecdote from a linguist who – I don’t remember which linguist anymore – who said that they’d told this to somebody – an English speaker and a Spanish speaker who were in a marriage together – and they both spoke each other’s languages, but they didn’t have an understanding that this was actually a pragmatic difference between them. Sometimes, they would get in fights by like, “What do you mean you say I understand? You don’t know what’s going on in my internal mental state. You’re just assuming what I know.” Which was actually a systematic pragmatic difference in how the languages use those particular mental state verbs rather than a case of just not understanding between the partners.

Lauren: That is amazing. The thing I find really interesting about that anecdote is that the distinction between the two forms of “understand” was really implicit between the two languages. I’m really interested in those grammatical features where knowledge state becomes very overt. That’s essentially what motivated me to study how we grammatically track source of information, which is the area of evidentiality. We had a whole episode on that that I will not assume you’ve listened to, and I will not assume you remember anything from, but essentially, evidentiality is used to keep track of, depending on the language, whether you know something because you saw it or because someone else told you about it or maybe you’re not entirely certain about it. This is marked as a feature of the grammar rather just being implicit or optional.

Gretchen: In English, you have the option of saying something like, “It’s raining,” “I can see that it’s raining,” “I can guess that it’s raining because I can hear the rain drops,” or because someone’s walked in, and their shoulders and umbrella are all soaking wet. You can say all of those things to indicate the source of your knowledge, but you don’t have to. You could just say “It’s raining” and let someone else figure out how you came to know that information.

Lauren: Whereas if we look at a language like Yolmo in Nepal that I’ve worked with, you can actually see someone’s knowledge state changing throughout the story that they’re telling because maybe they start with talking about something in a way where they’re not certain if this cake is going to be delicious, and then they talk about how someone told them it’s going to be delicious, and then finally, they have direct sensory evidence of how delicious the cake is. You see how the knowledge about the cake being delicious is really clearly marked by the grammatical choices that they have to make throughout the story. It means that I can keep track of someone else’s source of evidence in a way that’s more direct than in English. It means that people are more attentive to mine as well.

Gretchen: So, if you wanna say something like, “I infer that you understand,” you would be doing that with the evidential marker. Or “You told me that you understood this yesterday, so why don’t you understand it today,” then you’d have a lot of ways of marking the differences between those internal mental states.

Lauren: Yes. And those internal state experiences of if someone’s unwell or if someone’s hungry, I have to mark them differently if I don’t have any direct visual evidence. If you’re unwell, and you’re shaking and feverish, I can say that I can see you’re unwell. But if you’re unwell in a way that I can’t see, I have to use other grammatical ways of marking it. How you interact with other people’s internal states varies because sometimes you don’t have access to a direct source of evidence for it.

Gretchen: I feel like I’m just picturing those little cartoons you get in language learning textbooks where they have test very stereotyped representations of common illnesses that don’t have obvious physical things. Like, “I have a headache” would be like a person holding their head in great distress or with a hot water bottle on their head, and you’re like, “I don’t put a hot water bottle on my head when I have a headache.” Or like somebody who has a thermometer sticking out of their mouth or something to indicate these sort of things that aren’t really easily visually represented.

Lauren: It’s because figuring out someone else’s internal state is actually a really complicated cognitive task that we do, and we fall back on these tropes to help us navigate that.

Gretchen: I guess same for teaching other types of mental state verbs, you know, “know” or “understand” or “like” or something. You have these maybe very stereotyped or symbolic representations. If you have someone with a heart or something, maybe they’re liking it or loving it. But it’s difficult to do a picture of “I know,” “I understand.” Not everything is easily visualisable.

Lauren: You talked earlier about how it was a revelation for you at some point that maybe we can’t really know what’s happening in other people’s minds. There is a lot of cultural variation as to how much people are willing to feel like they’re able to intuit the internal states of other people – so much so that there’s a whole area of anthropology that looks at this idea of cultures where it’s really prevalent to assume that you can’t know someone else’s internal state. That’s the starting point for building social interactions.

Gretchen: This is the inverse of the Spanish thing where it’s like, “Yeah, I can infer your mental state.” This is like, “Nobody can really know what anyone else is thinking at all.”

Lauren: It’s a cultural assumption and starting point for building conversations and interactions that I’m gonna assume that I can’t know what your internal state is. I can only make reference to it by very overtly flagging that I don’t know that. I might talk about your actions rather than my assumptions about the thoughts behind those actions.

Gretchen: So, what does it look like in practice if someone’s operating under the assumption that you can never really understand what’s going on in someone else’s mind?

Lauren: A lot of the anthropologists who work in this area tend to look at the domain of gossip. I like to think of it in terms of – it just means that you’re unlikely to have gossip that goes along the lines of “What were they even thinking?” Instead, your gossip is more about the concrete actions of people rather than rationalising their mental state while they were doing those things.

Gretchen: Okay. So, not like, “This person had good intentions, but this thing didn’t work,” or “This person never cares about other people’s feelings, and so therefore…,” but it’s more like, “Oh, this person did this thing – ate my cake.”

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, assuming someone has good intentions is something that presumes that you can know what’s inside someone else’s mind.

Gretchen: It’s like, “This person ate my cake. I don’t care why they did it, but that’s what happened.”

Lauren: That tends to be more of the focus that gets talked about or that people might come upon by using strategies like grammatical evidentiality as a like, “You can’t know what’s in my mind, so let me tell you that I know that it’s raining because someone said or because I saw it.” Like, “Let me do that work for you of telling you my state of knowledge rather than you trying to guess something that you can’t guess.”

Gretchen: So, it’s not necessarily a thing of “We’re not talking about mental states,” but the person is the ultimate authority on their own mental state.

Lauren: Yeah. I think this area of opacity of mind is looking at commonalities between what are actually very different ways of approaching understanding people’s internal states because perhaps culturally we’ve just gone with the assumption that everyone thinks about social interaction the way we do and that maybe there’s a lot of variation there.

Gretchen: Lauren, are you saying we have bad theory of mind about theory of mind?

Lauren: Potentially. But I think learning about theory of mind as a bedrock and then opacity of mind as the way people approach this bedrock has made me more appreciative of keeping track of what people might know or not making assumptions about what people bring to any particular interaction. I really appreciate knowing about theory of mind for that reason.

Gretchen: I think practicing figuring out, okay, what are some possible mental states here, what might be going on. This is one of the things I really like about fiction, especially, reading books is you do get to be behind someone else’s eyes and thinking about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it even if their reasons for doing something are really different from what I would think. I find filmed stuff, unless there’s a lot of voiceover – I love voiceover because you can get into someone’s mind. Not everyone’s a fan of voiceover, but I love it because it gives you that internal mental state. I don’t just wanna look at someone’s face and think, “Oh, this is what they’re thinking.” I wanna be behind their eyes and thinking, “Oh, they actually think this is a good idea. Okay. Well, I’m along for this ride now.”

Lauren: I think fiction is a really great philosophical experiment. It’s one of the reasons I really find sci-fi to be interesting is because it can push the limits of what another mind is or what another mental state is to be thinking in. One thing we didn’t get to in the bonus episode about Arkady Martine’s Memory Called Empire is that there are people who have the capacity to take on the entire previous knowledge state of someone else. I just am like what would an evidential marking system be like for a person who has multiple consciousnesses worth of evidence for a statement.

Gretchen: Like, “I know this because my original consciousness knew this” or “I know this because the consciousness that I got added to mine later in life knows this.” Oh, man.

Lauren: There’re just so many layers of potential knowledge state there. That’s the kind of sci-fi that lets me bring my linguist brain to problems of consciousness.

Gretchen: I’ve been thinking about this from a practical level as well recently which is what’s the point of having a conference compared to just reading some blog posts or something about the same topic. I think it’s about that conferences create a state of shared knowledge among their participants. You know that everyone else was also at the same talks or in the same environment or is interested in the same topic, and so it gives you springboards for having conversations about topics of mutual interest rather than just “I’ve acquired this information.” It’s “I’ve acquired this information in a social context where I’ve also acquired a bunch of people to talk with about it.”

Lauren: I’ve never quite thought of conferences in that way, but that is a very wholesome, linguist-brain way to approach it.

Gretchen: Well, it’s partly why digital conferences can be unsatisfying because if you don’t know who else is in the audience and you don’t have any way of spending time with them then you don’t get to have that shared mental state with the fellow conference participants. You’re just receiving the knowledge in a way that you could do without the conference structure at all.

Lauren: I think that speaks to the way that approaching theory of mind allows you to just be more generous in the way you conceptualise other people’s intentions or their motivations or their actions, which is one thing I really appreciate about it.

Gretchen: I also think that there’s – I mean, this is definitely not in the canon of theory of mind – but it’s part of this thinking and reasoning about other people’s mental states. It’s also what the mental state is that you impose on someone else by reacting to something.

Lauren: Okay. I’m now very conscious about whatever I say in response to this anecdote.

Gretchen: I’m sorry. An example of this is the xkcd comic “Lucky Ten Thousand,” which reads, “I try not to make fun of people for admitting they don’t know things. Because for each thing ‘Everyone knows’ by the time they’re adults, every day there are, on average, 10,000 people in the US hearing about it for the first time.” And there’s some calculations. “If I make fun of people, I train them not tell me when they have these moments. And I miss out on the fun.” Then the little comic strip – this is two people – one says, “Diet Coke and Mentos thing? What’s that?” And the other one says, “Oh, man! C’mon we’re going to the grocery store.” “Why?” “You’re one of today’s lucky ten thousand.” Some of my friend groups have adopted “lucky ten thousand” when someone mentions like “Oh, what is this book?” or “What is this thing?” rather than say “Oh, you haven’t heard of that? What?”

Lauren: I can actually tell you exactly how Gretchen says it because Gretchen said to me when we were preparing for this, “Oh, you haven’t heard of the ‘Lucky Ten Thousand’? Oh my gosh, do I have the link for you.”

Gretchen: [Laughs] Exactly.

Lauren: It was so nice to not feel embarrassed to not know every comic in a canonical webcomic series and to be introduced to this very excellent one.

Gretchen: It makes the conversation happen in a much more positive way because then – you know, nobody’s read all the books. Nobody has done all of the things. You can have the conversation of “Oh, well, what did you like about it?” or “What is interesting about it?” without the shaming version of the conversation of “Why haven’t you done this?” or “What’s wrong with you that you don’t know this thing already?” I think this is a similar thing that happens when you create things as well, like “I wrote a book” or “on this podcast.” Sometimes, we’ll say something there or give some – like, here’s a set of examples or something. And sometimes people will reply, “Oh, I listened to your thing,” “I liked your thing and here is this other example for you.” Like, “Here’s another thing that you might like.” That frame is a really positive way of having that conversation and is something that I can then share with other people and say, “Oh, here’s this other thing that people might be interested in.” I can retweet it. Or “Here’s something else going on.”

Lauren: I always feel bad when people phrase it as though we have deliberately omitted something for nefarious reasons when it’s often just that we have a finite amount of time and there’re many languages.

Gretchen: Also, we don’t know everything. Sometimes, someone tells us about a new example.

Lauren: Sometimes, we get to be one of the lucky ten thousand for a topic in linguistics, and it makes us very happy.

Gretchen: The thing is, is the intentions are generally really good. People are excited to share things. They’re excited to talk about things. It’s just this common way of responding to things that doesn’t end up leading into the conversation that you wanna have and with a slight tweak could totally do that like the “lucky ten thousand thing.

Lauren: I also think about this modelling other people’s mental states and knowledge. I think one of the peak activities for that is creating a forwardable email.

Gretchen: Ooo.

Lauren: For those of us who spend a lot of time on email, occasionally, someone will say, “Cool. I’m glad we’ve agreed to do this thing. Can you put the details in a forwardable email so I can send it to the rest of the group?”

Gretchen: Right. Or “Can you introduce me to this person. Here’s why I think they’d be interested in talking about it.” And I’ll say, “Okay, I’ll write a forwardable email. I can send it to them, and then they can decide if they wanna talk to you,” or something like that.

Lauren: Me and this other person know that this email exchange has happened. I now need to write a single, useful, context-filled email that that person can forward on to the group that they want to do the thing with or someone that I am hoping to be introduced to. It requires me to think about what I know, what the person who asked me to do this email knows, and what this third person, who hasn’t been part of any of the prior conversation but needs all of the relevant context, needs to know. I just think that the mental state modelling involved and the mentalising what this person who hasn’t been part of the conversation needs is like Dunbar’s mental representation stuff as, like, multidimensional chess.

Gretchen: Because you end up saying – like, to the person you’re actually emailing, you’re telling them all of this information they already know, and that’s why you can sometimes specify to someone like, “Oh, yeah, please send me an email that I can forward to this person.” If I’m receiving a forwardable email, I know that you’re repeating information that I know, and it’s not patronising in this context because you know that I know that I’m gonna forward it to this third person who doesn’t know these things and so, therefore, that’s why you’re repeating this information that I already knew. There’s so many levels of understanding what other people are gonna potentially think in there.

Lauren: This is why, before we even get to thinking about language, we have to think about the cognitive processes that allow us to know where the marble is, to know if someone thinks cake is delicious, or to go to put everything into an email.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, “What the fricative” mugs, and other lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to 54 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and other rewards as well as helping keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include the linguistics of Pokémon, backchannelling, and translation in fiction. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their lives.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our Production Manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

📷

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[tsukkisbean]

how they cheer your up | headcanons

genre: fluff

characters: iwaizumi hajime, miya osamu, terushima yūji, kunimi akira x gn!reader

warnings: none!

a/n: hello if you’re seeing this, that means my scheduled post worked, yay!! hopefully this shows up in the tags otherwise i’ll have to reupload it at a later time (sorry in advance if that’s the case hehe). i’m also trying my hand at writing for other characters so hopefully this does their characters justice??

anyways, i hope everyone is doing well and staying healthy and happy! if you requested something from me, sorry i haven’t gotten to it even though i said i would. i’ll try my best to complete them when i get the chance, thank you for being patient with me 💖 all boys after iwaizumi are under the cut!

iwaizumi hajime

best boy iwaizumi would without a doubt use exercise as a way to cheer you up

but don’t get me wrong, he’s not going to force you to run a marathon or anything like that

i imagine him taking you to one of those entertainment/game parks (not really sure what they’re called ahh) where you guys just hang out all day

when you get there, he’ll immediately take you to the batting cage so you can just channel out all your anger into your swings

once your blood is pumping from the adrenaline he’ll take you to the trampoline area where you guys just bounce around and do flips into the foam pit to burn off all your extra energy

you’ll just be chilling, jumping up and down on one of the trampolines, your back turned to iwaizumi when he straight up scoops you up and tosses you in

he’s cackling and dying of laughter and when he finally offers to help you out you grab his hand and pull him in

when he doesn’t resurface you get nervous, where could he be?

from the corner of your eye you see the foam rumbling slightly but you react too slowly and iwaizumi pops out and tackles you in the biggest hug, peppering kisses all over your face and people are staring as you scream your head off trying to pry him off of you

for dinner, you guys indulge in all the greasy food the park has to offer, and by the end you’re stuffed

to help with digestion you suggest a game of mini golf which iwaizumi gladly agrees to

for someone who played volleyball his aim is absolutely horrifying

he argues that the windmill is IMPOSSIBLE to get a good score on and no one can ever get a hole in one

luck must have been on your side because you get a hole in one right after (and so does the small child behind you guys, but you choose not to tell him that)

you end up destroying him (he lowkey hints that he let you win but we know that’s not the case)

when the park closes, instead of taking you straight home, he’ll take you to a nearby park and the two of you just stroll around enjoying the chill of the night and the stars in the sky

miya osamu

he pulls you onto the couch next to him and the two of you look through baking videos on youtube and osamu being osamu cannot decide because he wants to make them all

eventually you guys settle on a cake recipe by cooking tree (a/n: 10/10 would recommend watching them, their videos are super soothing and aesthetic esp if you enjoy cooking asmr!!)

so at 9pm you guys set off to the grocery store to buy the ingredients you guys are missing 

the trip takes much longer than expected because osamu keeps putting in more and more snacks that you guys definitely don’t need

so instead of shopping osamu is trying to grab as many snacks as you can while you trail behind, trying to put them away  because your pantry is already way too full

by the time you get home it’s close to 12 and you’re tired but osamu insists that you guys start now

for the most part all goes well, you guys manage to get the batter to look smooth in the cake pan (definitely some playful flour throwing here and there)

the real problem is assembling the cake. at this point you’re wondering why you guys decided on a 3-layered cake that required cutting

teases you for cutting the first layer slanted and so you pass over the cutting to him but his slicing work is just as bad and you just have to bring up the fact that he owns a restaurant but apparently his knife skills suck

you thought cutting the cake would be a problem?? now you guys have to fill the layers and it’s a complete disaster; there’s whipped cream just everywhere and at this point you guys are half filling the cake half throwing it at each other

cake ends up being iced unevenly but that’s the least of your problems

you guys pour the decorative icing on top and instead of running over the sides only slightly, it drips messily down the cake and onto the counter and now you guys have a blob of a cake

you guys spend the rest of the night cleaning up and pass out on the couch and in the morning you guys enjoy a sweet breakfast together <3

terushima yūji

terushima is a free soul and so he believes expressing yourself through art is one of the best ways to feel better

when he sees that you’re down, he’ll immediately whip out all of his salon products and pull you into the bathroom

he takes you by surprise saying that he wants you to whatever you want to his hair - today his hair is your canvas

at first you’re reluctant, but he insists - as a hair stylist it’s all about experimentation with styles and colours and plus he can easily fix whatever you do considering that it is his job after all

so you guys scroll through pinterest together, trying to find some fun hair ideas that you’d be able to pull off on your own (with some instruction from teru of course)

you finally decide on a style and so together start on getting all the hair dye ready

he explains to you the different types of develops and how important they are in the hair colouring process - there are different volumes and will essentially affect how much your hair colour changes

after all the colours are mixed and ready to go, you gingerly grab a piece of hair, constantly checking your phone to make sure you’re doing it exactly like the photo

meanwhile terushima has the softest smile on his face, watching you through the mirror - he thinks you look absolutely adorable with the way your brows are furrowed and your tongue sticks on slightly as you focus

as you run the colour brush along his hair, he’s constantly encouraging you, telling you what a good job you’re doing and how he’s so excited to the end product

while the dye sits in his hair, you sit in his lap

once it’s time to wash out the hair dye, you bring him to the sink and carefully run your hands through his hair, trying your best to give him the best head massage he’s ever had!!!

after toning and a hair treatment, your masterpiece if finally done!! ofc being the boyfriend he is, he takes a million photos and posts them on social media to show how talented his significant other is - like not only is it your first time dying someone’s hair but you managed to pull off RAINBOW hair!! (a/n: think sehun from exo as a reference hehe) he literally will not shut up about you to his clients tomorrow

kunimi akira

kunimi has a rep for being lazy and just overall a really nonchalant kind of person but he’s sharp, so when you’re feeling down he immediately picks up on it even if he doesn’t confront you about it

however i don’t think he’d be as aggressive as the other three and do something huge rather he tries to make you feel better only in smaller ways and it definitely adds up

like in the morning he’ll make you coffee or tea or whatever you want - orange juice, a bakery bun? he’ll make an excuse saying he wanted something from the convenience store anyways and head down. when he comes back  with three bags of food and drinks he’ll insist that he just grabbed whatever he saw because he was “too lazy to decide” n b d

throughout the day he’ll be a lot more affectionate than usual, hugging you whenever he gets the chance, maybe even a kiss on your forehead

when you tell him you want to go out on your own for a bit  he doesn’t argue - whatever you need to do but when your back is turned he’ll slip you a handwritten note telling you to enjoy your alone time and that he l-word you and it’s even signed off with a teensy teensy heart that you almost don’t notice

when you get back, you’re greeted with the smell of your delicious food mixed with a burning smell and on the kitchen table you see takeout from your favourite restaurants and in the garbage is a black burnt mess - kunimi insists he doesn’t know how it got there even though its quite obvious

you bring the food to the living room and to your surprise there’s a blanket fort set up with pillows spread out all across the floor

when you try to question him, he just shrugs saying that it’s not that hard to throw a blanket over a couple of chairs, even a baby could do it

today he lets you choose the movie even though it’s technically his turn and when you choose a  comedy he doesn’t complain about the obnoxiously loud and hot headed lead character

when the movie is over, he quickly cleans up all the trash, making sure you don’t have time to move from your spot

when he comes back, he flops on top of you, holding you close

then he plays the spotify playlist that he made for you; it’s a whole mix of songs - slow, upbeat, instrumentals - anything he thought might help you feel even the tiniest bit better

and so you guys just lay there not speaking, enjoying each other’s presence until you fall asleep