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The most expected and unexpected union I've ever witnessed

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Before the computing era, ILM was the master of oil matte painting, making audiences believe that some of the sets in the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones trilogy were real when they weren’t. They were the work of geniuses like Chris Evans, Michael Pangrazio, Frank Ordaz, Harrison Ellenshaw and Ralph McQuarrie ! Forever thank you, to their handmade art and the work of their colleagues, that made us dream of impossible worlds and fantastic places across Earth and the Universe.

There are more background paintings on this article, featuring comments by the masters/artists themselves ! 

Some of the following pieces were made by other artists 2:

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OP: The dragon is controlling weather again.

Several days ago on May 2, 2025, Xi’an experienced a rare storm with heavy rain and lightning at night. Multiple people filmed 龙Long, unidentified creature moving through the sky—its motion and speed matched exactly how chinese dragons (Chinese Long ≠ Western dragons. Same word, different beings, 'dragon' is just for convenience.) are described in legends and myths. Then, in the early hours of May 5, Chengdu also had an unusually strong storm with wild winds and lightning. Locals there caught the same 'dragon' on video too.

The discussion is super active on Xiaohongshu and Douyin. If you're interested, try searching these chinese keywords: ‘西安 见龙’ (Xi'an Long sighting), ‘成都 见龙’ (Chengdu Long sighting), ‘女生宿舍 龙’ (girls' dorm Long video), or ‘高邮龙吸水’ (Gaoyou waterspout). The Xi'an one has multiple angles, so there's no way it's fake. I didn’t include the Xi'an one in the compilation video because there’s just too much footage.

People online compiled past Long sightings, and these are all highly credible (the clips were checked no Photoshop). The most convincing ones are still the Gaoyou waterspout livestream and the college girls’ dorm footage. Check the earlier post about 龙Long for reference.

Personally, the most mind-blowing one is that girls' dorm footage. The original’s on Bilibili—actually super clear and intense. You see a girl filming a storm from her balcony when she spots the Long, freaks out, and yells for her roommate (who chickens out). Then the Long seems to notice her—there’s this creepy staring moment—and she bolts inside. The Long’s eyes glow, and its head, mouth, and claws match ancient paintings and texts perfectly. Zero chance it’s fake. Even today’s tech or AI couldn’t pull that off, let alone a crappy non-smartphone back then.

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By LabradoriteKing on Pinterest

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They Have AO3?!?

So apparently AO3 is cannonical to the DC universe, in which it is called Tales of our own or TO3!

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Stickers are the real shit.

Back then when I was at uni and chose my second mandatory language class (English was the first) I had the opportunity to decide between German, Japanese, Chinese and French. The oblivious answer was Japanese to me (I already knew German, Chinese is complicated and I hate French).

The group consisted of only seven people. All older than the average on our year because we did some extra years at high school (like the standard 4 year graduation + 2 year "above school" in our chosen profession). All of us was 20+ year old with different business backgrounds (accounting, finance, project management, marketing, stb.).

Our sensei (bless her heart) was the most adorable and proficient teacher in my life, and I had lot of bad (very bad) language teachers (15+ year German learning, 10+ year English learning in Central Europe). She knew we had a pretty hard workload from our different major (and jobs) so she never graded us. The only things that she motivated us were stickers.... Sumikko Gurashi stickers, Sakura petals stickers, cat stickers, cute, little, colourful stickers...

At the beginning of every class we wrote a vocabulary test and if we did good we got to choose a sticker (not just got one, we could choose one).

We, 20+ year old woman and men with very serious business majors and already had apprenticeships and jobs in the field, went crazy on those stickers. After a year we took our JLPT exam with flying colors. All of us did some thesis and papers on Japan's various business aspects. As I heard all of us are in between N4 and N3 right now and can communicate very well in the language when we are travelling the country (because of course we visit Japan more than one time).

All because we were motivated with kawaii chiisai stickers and we collected them like Pokemon tazos.

i literally love when people realize positive reinforcement works like yes its so silly isnt it. but it literally works humans love juice reward too

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I was asked by a friend yesterday if I could offer basic tips about comic paneling. As it turns out, I have a lot to say on the matter! I tried breaking down the art of paneling using the principles of art and design, and I hope it helps you out!

EDIT: uh uh there are a lot of people reblogging this, so i figure i may as well append this now while i can lol

This whole thing was very much cranked out in a few hours so I had a visual to talk about with a friend! If this gives you a base understanding of paneling, that's awesome! Continue to pull in studies from the comics you see and what other artists do well and don't do well! You can tell paneling is doing well when the action is flowing around in its intended reading format.

Here's the link to the globalcomix article from which I pulled the images about panel staggering! Someone sent in a reblog that it wasn't totally clear that the 7th slide mostly covers what NOT to do in regards to staggering, and that is my mistake!

I saw in a tag that someone was surprised I used MamaYuyu too, and I don't blame them lol. If I had given myself more than a couple hours maybe I would have added something else on, I just really admire MamaYuyu's paneling personally.

uh uh, final append: I am by no means a renowned master of paneling, so if you find anything off base here, by all means, counter it with your own knowledge and ways you can build upon from here! Art is always a sum knowledge of everything we find. 💪

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A master post of Thomas Romain’s art tutorials.

There’s not enough space to post all of them, SO here’s links to everything he has posted (on twitter) so far : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. 

Now that new semesters have started, I thought people might need these. Enjoy your lessons!

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The Tale of Princess Kaguya | dir. Isao Takahata (2013)

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yall better be just as outraged about this as you were about notre dame

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today’s obsession is ancient tattoos, in particular the s-curved floral-antlered deer of the Siberian Ice Maiden and Scythian Chieftain. 

it’s such a heavily used trope in modern media (off the top of my head I can think of Pokemon, Annihilation, Bambi, Snow White and the Huntsman, etc) and why wouldn’t it be! antlers look like branches, branches look like antlers, it’s only natural to pair them

but it makes me strangely emotional that our brains have always worked this way, and been drawn to the same imagery over and over again. 

I’m also going to resist the urge to make paired enamel pins of these ancient deer, even though I deeply desire little wearable tributes of the past

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Important if your in an abusive situation you can turn off this alarm

Please reblog to spread awareness

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A New History of Fandom Purges

On November 24th, 2018, I posted a list of major deletions of sites or of content on sites that stripped fandom of its history. A bunch of pro-shipper blogs had just been deleted, and people were nervous. I suppose I was thinking “All this has happened before…”

On December 3rd, 2018, Tumblr’s Department of Irony announced the NSFW ban. Thanks for providing this salutary lesson to The Youth and a billion reblogs to me, I guess.

Today, we have AO3 for writing. Audio, images, and video are in as much danger as ever, yet fans attack AO3 every donation drive. For those of you who forget our past…

HERE IS WHAT HISTORY HAS TAUGHT US!

1992 - Chelsea Quinn Yarbro forces a zine to be destroyed

1995 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites

1995 - Anne Rice gets IWTV fic deleted everywhere

1997 - Fox and Lucasfilm go after fansites

1998 - AOL goes after X-Files fansites

2000 - Warner Brothers goes after Harry Potter fansites

2000 - Anne Rice anne rices again

2001 - Tripod Massacre

2001 - Anne Rice goes after IWTV fic on FFN

2001 - The Bronze shut down as Buffy changes networks

2002 - FFN bans porn

2002 - FFN bans RPF

2003 - Gryffindor Tower implodes

2004 - FFN bans script format

2005 - FFN bans CYOA, Readerfic, 2nd person, Songfic

2005 - Sheezyart bans adult content; y!gallery founded

2005 - Viacom/Paramount goes after fansites again

2006 - Sakura Lemon Archive suddenly closes

2007 - Strikethrough, Boldthrough on Livejournal

2007 - Youtube institutes Content ID, deleting many fanvids

2008 - Slash Cotillion closes, taking much historical m/m with it

2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites

2009 - Greatestjournal shuts down; RPGs deleted

2009 - Marvel gets scans_daily deleted

2009 - imeem, major vidding hub, closes suddenly

2010 - FFN forums purged for inactivity

2010 - DeviantArt purges adult fanfic

2010 - Literate Union goes after Twilight fandom on FFN

2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence

2011 - China arrests women for writing m/m; destroys danmei.org

2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn

2012 - Megaupload deleted for piracy; also destroys vids, podfic

2013 - Max-Dan-Wiz.com purged of fan-generated content

2014 - Quizilla shuts down

2014 - China purges m/m story websites; arrests female authors

2014 - Blip.tv deletes vids

2014 - Viddler deletes vids

2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank

2016 - y!Gallery deleted

2016 - Elfwood goes offline

2016 - Audiofic Archive corrupted; major blow to podfic

2017 - Chinese author jailed after being ratted out over fandom drama

2017 - Parents get queer Warrior Cats fic purged from Wattpad

2018 - Tumblr deletes pro-shipper blogs

2018 - Tumblr announces NSFW ban

2018 - Wattpad deletes accounts/fics without warning

2019 - China purges weibo of m/m; more women jailed

This is only a small taste of the many times that:

Fannish moderators got bored, ran out of money, or had a falling out, deleting a site/list/forum along the way.

Sites got bought out and closed for being unprofitable.

Fandom got hit as governments targeted piracy or political dissidents.

Fans grudge reported each other.

Official forums got deleted when the canon finished.

It’s not always malicious. It’s not always about us. But we lose every time.

Some of these purges hit everyone. Many of them hit m/m content specifically or female gaze-y material in general. This is why antis are dead wrong. This is why anti-fujoshi policies end up being anti-m/m policies. This is why we need clear labeling, not content restrictions.

This is why we need AO3.

And it’s why we need a solution for audio, visuals, and video too.

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So a free tool called GLAZE has been developed that allows artists to cloak their artwork so it can't be mimicked by AI art tools.

AI art bros are big mad about it.

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Images only, link to original Twitter at the bottom of post.

Full🧵 here: