#ps tips

[veramitar]

Your rendering and use of foreground blur (specifically in the radio man piece and the arrow drawing) are incredible, could you speak a bit to your process when it comes to rendering works like those ? You are kick arse

I'm really fond of the Bokeh effect. They make flat visuals dimensional and more alive. It almost mimics the way we naturally view things in the real world; where we focus our sight on one thing at a time and the rest are blurred. It also makes the picture appear as if you're there in the same space where and when the shot was taken. And digitally, nothing emulates this effect as seamlessly and efficiently as Filters✨

Basically, just top a Blur filter on the element/layer. In the Radio Man piece, I used Motion Blur and Gaussian together for the trumpet (foreground element)--But not before converting the layer of the foreground element into a Smart Object. AFAIK, in Photoshop, filters are rasterized into a regular layer when applied, making the effect irreversible unless you undo it immediately. If you're beyond several commands after applying it, Ctrl+Z won't help you.

Best practice is to convert the layer into a smart object before applying any filters. This allows you to edit the drawing/source layer, while stacking as many filters, which are adjustable too, as you want. It's a minor step but very helpful in organizing and preserving the quality of your layers. The same process was applied to the arrow drawing, only difference was using a mask layer on the smart object to specify the areas exempted from the blur.

I'm curious on other artist's process particularly in achieving the Bokeh effect. Do share your nuggets of experience regardless of the software you used 👀✨

[cecoeur]

Yes, you are.

8th of June, 2014 | Daniel Ricciardo's First Formula 1 Grand Prix Victory

[therookieyear]

Moments from the 2017 Stanley Cup Final

[teddyedwards]

Here's my resignation, I'll serve it in drag! / All rock and roll is homosexual

Manic Street Preachers and My Chemical Romance on defying gender and sexuality norms

nicky wire photographed by mick hudson / gerard way at Riotfest / mama by mcr / born a girl by msp / richey edwards / gerard way by kenneth capello / frank iero / james dean bradfield / a version of reason by rob jovanovic / interview with gerard way / frank iero's pansy guitar / richey edwards fairy t-shirt

[ronniaugust]

How To Write Good Dialogue (Part 1)

I'm gonna start this by saying I'm not trying to sound like a know-it-all. I am just tired of posts like these being absolutely fucking useless. I am aware this is basically me screaming into a void and I’m more than okay with that.

This guide is meant for intermediate screenwriters, but beginners are also absolutely welcome. :)

(about me)

-♠︎-♠︎-♠︎-♠︎-

I've noticed a rise in film students who want to make films that have no dialogue. Probably after your professor showed you Doodlebug, right? Fuck that.

I'll make another post about writing a short film, but all you need to know is: Don't waste the audience’s time. Most of these no-dialogue shorts have very little substance and take way too long to tell the shortest possible story. Not a good idea.

Useless Dialogue

Plain and simple, don't write useless dialogue. Useless dialogue is dialogue that just doesn't fucking matter. Dialogue matters by having ✨subtext.✨

What is subtext? Subtext is the meaning behind the action. That's it.

If I tell you that I love you and I got big doe eyes while I say it, it means I love you. If I tell you I love you through a clenched jaw without looking at you, I don't necessarily love you right now.

Simple, right? Great.

Now think about the subtext behind every line. Does your character mean what they're saying? Are they doing it to get what they want? What is going through their mind as they say it? As long as you know your character, you’ll have these answers ready to go. If you don’t, you’ll figure it out eventually. Just keep writing.

When you write your character walking into a Starbucks and saying, "One venti iced coffee," does that do something? Why do I need to see someone's boring Starbucks order? Do I need to know that your character's boring? Why are you writing a boring character? [Of course, in the rare situation where this is some revealing clue to the massive crime investigation, then it makes sense.]

Useless dialogue is any dialogue that has no meaning or purpose in your script. Delete and move on. You don't need to write entire conversations or scenes that bore us, just write what we care about.

I took a class once where my professor called a version of this "trimming the fat." Get us into your scene and out of your scene in as little time as it takes to have it achieve its full purpose in the script.

[P.S. You don’t “inject” subtext into your lines. Idk who started that vernacular in subtext teachings but I hate it.]

Show vs. Tell

I remember a glorious fight I got into with a Redditor last year about show vs. tell… TL;DR: Dialogue is “show” if you write it with intention and subtext. If someone says that dialogue is inherently “tell,” they’re wrong and can go fuck themselves.

Dialogue that is “tell” is expositional dialogue. But, hot take: Exposition isn't just in dialogue. It’s also those annoying clichés that make you roll your eyes in the theater (which we just call clichés and not exposition). I’m sure every professor I’ve had will disagree with this and then get me into a long conversation about it, but let’s ignore that for right now.

Have you ever seen a movie where a character rubs an old, worn-out photo of a young girl while looking depressed? That's exposition. That character has a dead daughter. No shit.

Clichés are incredibly annoying. We all know that. Assume that any cliché you see - in this context - is exposition and try your best not to write it. (Tropes are different and sometimes necessary, so I’m not talking about that.)

Point blank: When you have subtext in your lines, they are "show,” not “tell.”

Before moving on, I'll bring up that while technically the dead daughter photo is subtextual, it is as close to the character saying “My daughter is dead,” as you can get. Don't treat the audience like we're fucking stupid.

The First 15

If you don’t know what the Inciting Incident is, please look up “3 Act Structure” before reading this.

The first 15 pages of your script is the part that comes before the Inciting Incident. This is the part you want to get right because, although people probably won’t leave the theater, they will absolutely find something else on the streaming service they’re using. The people making said movie will also just toss your script in the trash before it’s even produced, so it's best to get it right.

Dialogue in the first 15 generally follows the same rules, but carries a heftier additional rule. All dialogue in the first 15 minutes must, must, must tell us something about your character.

Remember when I talked about that boring Starbucks order? Why is your character boring? Don’t write that. Don’t write nice characters. Or pleasant characters. Or friendly characters. No one cares.

You want empathy. This does not mean “relatable.” It means “empathetic.” There is a difference.

I personally relate to Vi in Arcane, but I empathize with Theo in Children of Men. Both are excellent, but one personally resonates a bit more with me. You cannot write a character that deeply resonates with every single person, it is impossible.

With each line of dialogue, you must be saying something about your character that generates the empathy. Instead of telling you how to do this, I’ll direct you to a movie that will do better than an explanation: Casablanca.

Watch how Rick interacts with the world. What kind of man is Rick? Watch what he does, what he says, and how he treats people and himself. Watch that empty glass on the table. Watch his contradictions. Everything. Those things matter and it’s what makes you want to watch Rick for the entire duration of Casablanca.

“Realism”

This is maybe more directorial, but make your characters human enough, not too human.

Too human is when you’ve tried your best to capture all those little life-like speech patterns. You know, the ones that no one fucking cares about.

If your character coughs, they’re sick. If they clear they’re throat, they’re uncomfortable. If a bruise isn’t going away, they’re going to die. Simple.

Every moment on screen matters. Everything the audience sees is meant to lead them to a conclusion. Not the conclusion, just a conclusion.

The realism you want is in the choices your character makes, not how many times they say “Uh,” in a sentence.

Conclusion

Dialogue matters and should not be treated lightly or without care. Once you have this all engrained in your mind, dialogue should become effortless.

If you want an excellent way to think about this, Robert McKee's Story has an excellent chapter that helped clarify this all for me. Here's an excerpt and the context.

Warning, spoilers for Chinatown.

"If I were Gittes at this moment, what would I do?"

Letting your imagination roam, the answer comes:

"Rehearse. I always rehearse in my head before taking on life's big confrontations."

Now work deeper into Gittes's emotions and psyche:

Hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel, thoughts racing: "She killed him, then used me. She lied to me, came on to me. Man, I fell for her. My guts are in a knot, but I'll be cool. I'll stroll to the door, step in and accuse her. She lies. I send for the cops. She plays innocent, a few tears. But I stay ice cold, show her Mulwray's glasses, then lay out how she did it, step by step, as if I was there. She con-fesses. I turn her over to Escobar; I'm off the hook."

EXT. BUNGALOW-SANTA MONICA

Gittes' car speeds into the driveway.

You continue working from inside Gittes' pov, thinking:

"I'll be cool, I'll be cool ..." Suddenly, with the sight of her house, an image of Evelyn flashes in your imagination. A rush of anger. A gap cracks open between your cool resolve and your fury.

The Buick SCREECHES to a halt. Gittes jumps out.

"To hell with her!"

Gittes SLAMS the car door and bolts up the steps.

Story by Robert McKee, pg 156

The context of this page is McKee's way of explaining how to write characters. I found it very helpful.

-♠︎-♠︎-♠︎-♠︎-

Thanks for reading! I probably forgot something, so I made this a “part 1.”

I hope this helps someone since I’m really tired of finding short films on YouTube that are all fucking silent. The few who have done it well have been copied to death, so please write some dialogue. I promise you it’s so much better if you do.

Asks are open! :)

[daffi-990]

Seven(ish) Sentence Sunday ✍️

Tagged by @diazsdimples @giddyupbuck and @wikiangela. Thank you lovelies mwah 😘

Have a little something from LA Lonely -> this is after the fun and orgasms of Buck and Eddie’s hook up. Still don’t know if I’m going to go full spice 🌶️ or just do a quick little run down of things.

Prev snippet & mood board here

Buck expects him to start pulling his clothes on and to give him the whole “this was fun, but I gotta bounce” speel, but Eddie surprises him by climbing back into bed and nudging Buck to roll onto his side so Eddie can scoot up behind him and hold him.

Buck freezes for a moment because no one does this. They have their fun and then they leave. They don’t stay and they definitely don’t cuddle.

Eddie must feel him go tense because his hold loosens and he moves as if he’s about to pull away. “Is this okay?”

Buck grabs at the arms that are wrapped around him, stopping Eddie’s descent. “Y-yeah. It’s-it’s okay.” He pulls at Eddie’s arms and the man settles back behind him, burrowing his face into the juncture where Buck’s neck meets his shoulder as he shuffles closer.

Soft kisses are pressed into his skin and Buck is helpless but to relax back into Eddie, letting the comfort and warmth of whatever is happening wrap around him.

“Stay?” He whispers, not sure if Eddie can hear him but not being brave enough to say it any louder. He feels like he’s asking too much.

A kiss behind his ear. “Okay.”

No pressure tagging: @hippolotamus @puppyboybuckley @exhuastedpigeon @spotsandsocks @devirnis @wikiangela @hoodie-buck @honestlydarkprincess @homerforsure @monsterrae1 @missmagooglie @mellaithwen @nmcggg @lover-of-mine @ladydorian05 @loserdiaz @bekkachaos @wildlife4life @watchyourbuck @weewootruck @elvensorceress @eddiebabygirldiaz @evanbegins @rewritetheending @rainbow-nerdss @captain-hen @jeeyuns @jesuisici33 @glorious-spoon @fortheloveofbuddie @fiona-fififi @disasterbuckdiaz @thewolvesof1998 @try-set-me-on-fire @theotherbuckley @steadfastsaturnsrings @tizniz @athenagranted @alliaskisthepossibilityoflove @spagheddiediaz @sunshinediaz and as always, anyone else who wants to share something -> consider this your tag ☺️

[drifting-moon]

🩷🩵 ayakanon matching rentry graphics (self indulgent)

like/rb and credit if using!!

[screwpinecaprice]

Got a freeform connverse ko-fi request, baby!

I mean, the request was them doing something cute as a couple, but almost same thing.

Thank you for the tip and request, Alphasun! 😁

[workinclass]

Apo Nattawin in Harper's Bazaar Singapore

[ipso-faculty]

A review of intersex/intergender flag mashup techniques

I really like it when I can figure out what a new pride flag means just from my knowledge of other flags, and I know I'm not alone on this. For example, here are some flags other people have made that I could immediately figure out were <thing> plus intersex:

So, I've been thinking about how we as intersex flag creators can create hybrid flags in consistent way. I'm most motivated to figure out a recipe for intergender flags: genders that are connected to being intersex.

I assembled a spreadsheet of 66 gender flags, and wrote a Python script to take my csv file, parse it, and use the drawsvg library to draw the different flags in different ways. And then I stared at the results, showed them to friends, and discussed what would be both reliable in terms of producing clear, decent-looking results. (A subset of the results are under the keep reading cut.)

In this post I'm gonna review five mashup techniques that I automated and talk about advantages/disadvantages to each. But first a TLDR: adding yellow border stripes is a simple and reliable way to make an intersex-hybrid flag that is now my favourite (and recommended) way to make a new intergender flag.

For example, here's the interfluid flag (genderfluid in a way that is specifically intersex):

***

Method 1: put a ring on it - advantages: simple to do, simple to understand - disadvantages: incredibly dependent on how well the ring colour works with background stripes, and the number of stripes. Would very roughly estimate only ~20% look decent.

Here's a subset of the results. Some, like genderfaun, look nice, but most look awkward:

A yellow ring is even worse:

I think the purple ring has a bit of potential, but I think it's not really viable for being used as a consistent, procedural way to make intergenders. ***

Method 2: stick a belt on it - advantages: already used for some existing mashups - disadvantages: some other genders are doing similar things, like voidpunk, and a white belt has been used by tons of groups for their mashups (e.g. neurogender).

It looks better than the ring alone, but I was still kinda underwhelmed because of how much it depends on the background stripes to not clash. Very roughly I'd say about 40% of the total results look good. Again, here's genderfae through paragender for comparison:

Using a purple belt helps in some cases but makes for some visually busy results:

The purple ones make me think of pokéballs. Again, there are some nice looking ones, but the effect over the whole group was underwhelming. ***

Method 3: inset into the ring - advantages: it's the most clearly "intersex plus X" - disadvantages: hard to read flags where the stripes are similar to each other; might clash with ring colour

When zoomed out like this the results aren't always super easy to read, but overall I'd say this is a reasonably reliably method - very roughly 60% of the results look good to me.

Playing with lightness and contrast on the inset flag likely would improve that number, but my goal here is to compare methods without tweaks.

Insetting into the intergender flag has similar results:

Method 4: add intersex-coloured stripe to the middle - advantage: seems like it would be simple - disadvantage: yellow middle stripe used for pansexual mashups; purple stripe is used in a bunch of of existing mashups - also disadvantage: turns out to actually be complicated in how to do it. Many flags have an odd number of stripes, not all flags have equal-length stripes, etc. I got buggy results on a whole bunch of flags like hijra and hypergirl and honestly if it takes dedicated debugging to fix it's probably too complicated.

When the original flag has an odd number of stripes, I doubled the original middle stripe up and this only works if there's a symmetry to the flag and all the stripes are of equal size.

The results are kinda busy. It looks good to my eyes very roughly 1/8 of the time (~12%) (I did an alternate version where I doubled the purple stripe around the original middle stripe and it's way worse.)

Purple stripe:

Yellow stripe looks less busy but more confusing:

Method 5: add border stripes with intersex colours - advantages: simple - disadvantages: maybe not as obviously intersex

I honestly didn't expect to like this one, but it has turned out to be my favourite. It works really reliably, like ~90% of the time, and it's distinctive.

Surprisingly, using purple gives a really different vibe. It kinda makes me feel claustraphobic:

Method 6: change the colours

This one I don't have automated results to share (at least not yet). Right now there are flags like how ultergender recolours the trans flag, that could serve as a template for recolouring.

This is much more complex computationally - I spent a bunch of time playing around with different colourspaces (HSV, LCH, oklab, okLCH) to try to do this automatically and have concluded that this actually a difficult computational problem and not feasible as a widescale recipe.

Part of why the ultergender recolouring works is there are just two colours to recolour. How should one recolour the genderfluid flag? The demigender flag? It's possible to create a convention but not something I'm up to this moment.

I think recolouring is better suited to creating entirely new identities (like ultergender) rather than intergenders that are "<gender> but in an intergender way". ***

Discussion

My goal in all of this has been to try and identify some reliable recipes for creating hybrid flags particularly for intergenders.

My entirely subjective and imprecise estimates of how reliably each method yielded a decent-looking result were: 1. Add yellow border: ~90%-ish 2. Inset: ~60% 3. Belt: ~40% 4. Ring: ~20% 5. Add middle stripe: ~1/8-ish

I was honestly surprised at how much I liked the yellow border method and the friends I've shown it to so far have liked it as well!

I'd like to propose adding yellow border stripes as a recipe for creating intergender flags. This is already in use for interfluid (genderfluid in a specifically/uniquely intersex way):

Indeed, it's the only one of the mashup functions I wrote that yields something for genderfluid that I actually like:

Extrapolating, here are examples of some gender coinings that I think would work: Interdemigender: demigender in a specifically/uniquely intersex way and/or demigender in a way linked to being intersex/intergender

Intervaguegender: vaguegender in a way that is specifically intersex, such as in a way that is connected to being intersex (i.e. one's gender is vague not just for being neurodivergent but also intersex)

I think it works well! I hope you like it! Let me know if you have any feedback. If there are other mashup techniques I didn't think of, let me know. :)

[n1et]

I just got a cane and oh my god, my entire body is shaking. It's as if I was standing up for all my life and just sat down. Life changing decision to just go and get one, and it only costed 34 PLN, I could get like a single burger with no sides or drink for that. Solid oak, admittedly about 3cm too long but I'm gonna trim it in a sec.

And I never even had big issues with my legs, just a slight left hip joint problem, nothing painful, 99% of the time I didn't notice it. But I guess it was just overworked and stiff all this time? Even my tension headaches got slightly better.

If you feel like you have ANY issues with your legs just get a cane, or even go to a medical store and try it out for 10 minutes, you don't even have to buy it at first. The investment is so low and the difference is potentially massive.

I can't believe I waited over 4 years to do this.

[ashedrose]

so you've got a lotta blogs, but not a lotta patience to be signing in and out between em? i'm about to save your life !!

i. let's start with the email trick!

ps: i have only ever done it with gmail. if you use a different one, give it a try anyway! but i can vouch that it does work for gmail. it's super simple: youremail@gmail.com -> youremail+musename@gmail.com you just add +musename and you can create a new tumblr account while still having everything in the same email account! (you do this during the "sign up" component on tumblr, not your email! it'll automatically add it to your email. you can also add the +musename part to your email in account settings)

ii. now, multiple sign ins!

google chrome: profiles! on your browser, up top, right next to the settings you'll see a button for the profile attached to that browser. when you click it, you'll see the existing profile, and the option to "add" a new one. each profile is its own browser page, which allows you to sign onto a different tumblr account in each! i like to name mine according to the muse it belongs to so i can keep track. firefox: there's an extension called 'containers' which allows you to have multiple sign ins on the same site open!

if you've got any other tips to ease the process of having multiple muses and blogs, feel free to let me know and i'll add it to this!

i hope this helps! let me know if it does or if you've got questions about it!

happy roleplaying <3

[asynca]

This game is trying to destroy me emotionally

[montydrawsstuff]

a quick tip for making your espio art pop

Draw his wrist jazz at least double the size you would normally

Yo welcome

[serpentinesheldonserpentine]

The cheap thrifty New Englander’s guide to a clean sink and garbage disposal.

First, wet the sink.

Then shake the contents of that old box of baking soda you had in the fridge around the inside of the sink.

Scrub clean with a sponge.

Slice an old lemon, empty it plus some week-old ice into the sink.

Run water and turn on the garbage disposal.

Use a spatula to slowly nudge the lemon slices and ice cubes into the drain.

Rinse the sink so the baking soda drains.

You’ve deodorized your garbage disposal and cleaned its blades for the price of a lemon.

[alithographica]

It’s still a work in progress—hoping to get a big broad-leafed plant they can rest on/under—but Soup and Sandwich now have a proper enclosure