under-snow-vixen

[under-snow-vixen]

« True translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written. True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal. One reads and rereads the words of the original text in order to penetrate through them to reach, to touch, the vision or experience that prompted them. One then gathers up what one has found there and takes this quivering almost wordless “thing” and places it behind the language it needs to be translated into. And now the principal task is to persuade the host language to take in and welcome the “thing” that is waiting to be articulated. »

— John Berger, “Writing is an off-shoot of something deeper”

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the greatest picture ever taken

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Utah Birding! Featuring grebes, barn owls, ducks, flickers, rwbbs, and kestrels!

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me making my oc a worse person

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The Fishes

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#172-#025-#026. The Pikachu line is known for their rubber cheeks, conductive tails and love for chewing wires, ruining plugs and stealing batteries. At least they're cute doing it.....................

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You better start getting comfortable with the idea of an extremely broad anti-fascist coalition that includes tons of people who you strongly disagree with, because buddy, you're in one

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crazy how there's collectively maybe a dozen they/them characters in pieces of media that anyone talks about and if you go to look up things about them in queer fandom spaces then you'll still see them getting misgendered a good 60% of the time

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The Orlov Paleontology Museum (1987) by architect Yuri Platonov

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Bread clip animals

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the fact that the switch 2 tech demo tutorial 'game' costs money and is digital only is insane. remember when every wii came with wii sports for free? do you remember that? i am going to hunt down the nintendo execs for sport

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comic book trend that honestly irks the fuck out of me is when an existing character comes out as gay and they invent a new character to be their partner. like theres nothing wrong with it per se its just that the new boyfriend/girlfriend character is always jarringly bland and uninteresting, especially when compared to the latent homosexual potential that definitely already existed in the story. like there’s something so deeply unsatisfying about introducing a new side character as a girlfriend for karma in new mutants 2019 when she’d been having dramatic hand-holding adventures with dani the whole time. it implies such a definite hesitancy to ever make characters gay For Each Other, and the result of that hesitancy is that you don’t get any of the long-term slow-burn relationships that heterosexual characters get (like between batman and catwoman or whatever). instead you get New Relatable Millennial Queer Partner that you have to fight tooth and nail to give a fuck about. nobody’s doing it like rictor and shatterstar anymore nobody’s doing coming out reveals that hit like that

[under-snow-vixen]

I think there is a difference between the comic as a sequence of images with text and the comic as a comic. it's a subtle difference that an untrained eye might not see but the more one as artist draws comics the clearer this difference becomes, because one who first aspires to draw comics will soon find they are merely drawing sequences of images with text.

when people say an artist is clearly inspired by anime they often use "anime" to refer to japanese pop culture in general, but if you look more closely you can often tell it really is specifically anime rather than manga that inspired them, because the paneling and camera angles in their comics will read like a series of anime screenshots rather than a manga page. similarly, when I was a teenager really popular manga that had anime adaptions would sometimes get "animanga" reprints where they replaced the panels with the equivalent anime screenshots of the scene, and they often looked like dogshit because the very premise showed blatant disregard for why the original comic worked in the first place. these two examples are both about anime because i am a weeb but it applies outside that context too. a cartoon storyboard can be read as if it were a comic, but what it really is is a sequence of images with text that has yet to be refined into its actual intended format.

there are many artists who only employ the medium of comic because what they actually want to draw is a video, or a video game cutscene, but the only tool actually at their disposal is the ability to draw a series of images and add text to them so that is what they use. there is no shame or mistake in doing this, you have to make your art with the tools that you have available, and if the sequence of images with text is enough to convey the idea then it was the right tool for the job. but these are different mediums with different visual languages, languages which have a lot of overlap and can occasionally be used in each other's stead to achieve similar results (especially when drawing a fanart comic of a video game for example), but which are still ultimately different. the comic and the video and the cutscene are all different forms that a sequence of images with text can take but they are far from completely interchangeable.

there is a key difference in approach to the comic as a series of images roughly interchangeable with other forms of series of images like the video and the cutscene, and the comic as specifically the comic. this difference in approach is not always necessary to achieve results, an artist who wants to convey a scenario they came up with needs only the sequence of images with text to achieve this. but the difference between a comic with good writing and art, and a comic that is a good comic, is in whether it was treated as a comic rather than a sequence of images with text. I say this as an artist whose nearly every comic has been simply a sequence of images, because I just don't have the patience to refine it into a comic when I merely want to convey my idea rather than draw a comic. it takes a particular skill and insight that have to be developed and practised separately from the ability to draw well and the ability to write well in order to become good at making "the comic" as synthesis of the two.

it's hard to specifically point out the essence of this difference between the sequence of images and the comic because it's kind of a vibes thing honestly, and it depends on where and how the comic was meant to be published too. comics meant to have paper print editions have different constraints and requirements and frameworks to work with than webtoons meant to be read on slim mobile screens in a continuous scrolling format. a good traditional comic will consider not just how each individual panel looks but also the way each page as a whole looks, and how the pages look next to each other in a spread, and how it feels to turn the page towards the next spread. a good webtoon will consider the movement of scrolling down and how this affects the transition from one moment to another in its composition. time is time in videos and cutscenes but space is time in comics, and the space your have available determines how you can divide time across it. when you make a webcomic on your own website you have no constraints but the ones you set for yourself, and sometimes this leads to things like homestuck, which would not work in any other format than the one it created for itself.

the best comics are good because they tell their story and present their images specifically in the form of a comic, in a way that would not be possible if it were not specifically a comic. I think this is true for basically every medium, I'm just thinking about comics specifically lately, because even though I don't really consider myself a comic artist - because I usually draw sequences of images rather than comics - the thing my clients want to pay for is often still "a comic", and they don't know or care to tell the difference. it's a difference that, as established, is often fairly moot anyway, because as long as it successfully conveys your idea it's good enough. but it's precisely because the sequence of images is often good enough that the specific skill of the comic artist is often overlooked.

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[under-snow-vixen]

oh so the Yankees made their bats thicker and hit 20 runs bc of it and the league is just like yeah they're allowed to do that?? this whole time apparently it's been perfectly legal to just change the bats to make it easier and no one tried it until right now?? 150 years this sport has been around and suddenly someone had a bright idea??