Eucep's Random Junk

Imagine how you might feel if your wildest and most wonderful fantasies were brought to life. That’s probably how a child would feel if their drawings of strange and wondrous characters were turned into real-life plush toys, which is exactly what Budsies does.

BECAUSE IMAGINE IF AN ARTIST WANTED A PLUSH OF THEIR OC

THEY’D HAVE THEIR OWN PLUSH OF THEIR OC

Let’s make this whole quarantine a little bit more entertaining, shall we?

I am offering more frequent livestreams (as per my usual “twice a year because I hate commitments” schedule ) and also cheap commissions for those who show up. It will be broadcasted between 18:00-20:00 PM CEST on random weekdays. (Because I still hate commitments okay?:D ) Follow my Picarto get an e-mail notification: https://picarto.tv/lunareth   LIVESTREAM COMMISSION PRICES: Colored sketch bust: 40$ Sketch bust: 30$ + Character: +25$

Patrons will have priority to get these! No discounts as it’s already a discounted price.

Lust

Not a sin- feeling sexual attraction, sex with consenting partners, masturbation, consuming pornographic media, having several sexual partners, sex before mariage. IT’S A SIN WHEN- the person projects lust onto an unwilling recipient person and does not take into account their wants or consent. Rape, harassment, sexual assault, catcalling, dick pics.

Gluttony

Not a sin- food, enjoying food, cooking, eating sweets, eating meat. In the larger sense, accumulating material things you enjoy, like books or collectibles or whatever.  IT’S A SIN WHEN- It deprives other people of what they need.

Envy

Not a sin: Wanting things you see other people have, like money, power, fame. IT’S A SIN WHEN: This is how you define people, and stop respecting them as humans. It’s a sin when you use them for what they have and what they can bring you.

Greed

Not a sin: Wanting financial security, working hard for the things you want.  IT’S A SIN WHEN: Your own financial growth depends on keeping other people impoverished and suffering.

Pride

Not a sin: Being proud of your accomplishments, liking your looks, dressing up IT’S A SIN WHEN: It stops you from accepting your faults and seeing how you can be wrong, not admitting that you can better yourself. 

Wrath

Not a sin: Righteous anger at situations, being mistreated, seeing other people suffer, at the injustice of the world. Self-defense. Revolution.  IT’S A SIN WHEN: Violence towards defenceless people, hitting your partner or your kids,.  Violence fuelled by intolerance and bigotry. 

Sloth

Rutger Bregman is the Dutch historian who became a global sensation after an appearance at this year’s Davos summit, where he accused attending billionaires of ignoring taxation. Now he has created another viral moment in an extremely uncomfortable interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.

Bregman so riled Carson with his accusations of hypocrisy, critiques of Fox’s conservative agenda, and attacks on Donald Trump that the TV host called him a “moron” and angrily told him: “Go fuck yourself.”

Source

…This was the last day of the year for the class of 2018 at Glenelg High School. There was going to be an awards ceremony, a picnic, that end-of-a-journey feeling that always made [principal David Burton] so proud of his job. But as he was on his way to work at 6:25 a.m., the assistant principal had called, agitated and yelling about graffiti…

…Beneath his dress shoes, there were more swastikas. Spray painted around them were crude drawings of penises.

Then Burton saw the letters “KKK.” He saw the word “Fuck” again and again next to the words “Jews,” “Fags,” “Nigs” and “Burton.”

He kept walking, following the graffiti around the building’s perimeter. It was on the sidewalks, the trash cans, the loading dock, the stadium around back. There were more than 100 markings in total, though he didn’t bother to count.

He turned a corner and saw something written in large capital letters on the sidewalk: “BURTON IS A NIGGER.”

…A quarter of all hate crimes reported to the FBI, more than any other category, are similar to the attack discovered at Glenelg on May 24, 2018. Vandalism and destruction of property, a physical marking of an age-old threat: You don’t belong here.

…In one of those homes, 72-year-old Susan Sands-Joseph was watching. She knew Glenelg well. She was one of the first black students to attend the school after desegregation. Suddenly, all the memories that she tried not to dwell on were dredged up again: the words she was called, the tomatoes thrown at her head, the looks her parents gave her when she came home saying scalding hot soup had been pushed into her lap again. “It’s okay,” she had promised them. “I’m fine.”

…Panicked, [Seth Taylor, one of the vandals,] started Googling:

“How long do you go to jail for vandalism?”

And then: “Can you get a hate crime for painting swastikas?”

…He had already begun to separate what he’d done from who he believed himself to be. He hadn’t intended to hurt anyone, he said. He would always maintain he wasn’t an anti-Semite, a homophobe or a racist.

…At 11:35 p.m. on May 23, the students’ IDs began auto-connecting to the WiFi. It took only a few clicks to find out exactly who was beneath those T-shirt masks.

“You have the right to remain silent,” an officer said to Seth before long. “Anything you say or do . . . ”

They told him to remove his graduation cap and gown. They cuffed his arms behind his back.

Seth realized they were about to march him outside, past the windows of the cafeteria. By now it would be filled with students eating lunch.

“Can you cover my face so that the kids don’t videotape me?” he asked.

“No,” an officer replied. “You deserve this.”

…Most are unaware of the history that came before Columbia [a planned community founded on the principles of integration and inclusion in Howard County]. … An estimated 2,800 people were enslaved in the county at the beginning of the Civil War. A century later, when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 that schools must be desegregated, Howard County was so resistant that it took more than a decade for the black-only school, Harriet Tubman, to close its doors. The opposition to black students learning alongside white ones was so fierce, a cross was burned. It happened outside a school dance at Glenelg High School.

…Among black families like [Tyler Hebron’s], there were doubts that the white teens would face the kind of punishment black teens receive for similar crimes. Two years earlier, a group of students had painted swastikas on a historic black schoolhouse in Northern Virginia. A Loudoun County judge sentenced them not to jail time or community service, but to reading: along with visiting the Holocaust museum, each had to choose a single book about Nazi Germany or the Jim Crow era and write a report on it.

…Two of [the vandals] had tried to have the hate-crime charges dismissed. Their attorneys claimed that their First Amendment rights were being violated. They could be punished for the vandalism, the argument went, but not for what they wrote.

It didn’t work.

Now, it was [Judge William V. Tucker’s] job to answer a question the community had been debating for nearly a year: What consequences did these young men, now 19, deserve?

…Seth said he just wanted all of them to understand: He is not a racist.

Later, he would explain himself this way: “I never really understood the symbol of the swastika. I knew it was wrong to plaster it somewhere. I didn’t learn exactly what [the Nazis] were doing to the Jews until I went to the Holocaust Museum. I never learned that they were mutilated. I knew that they were, like, burned. But I never learned that they had experiments done on them, were injected with diseases. The school didn’t include that. They just included the burning and the train cars.”

His understanding of the KKK was limited, too, he said. “Some people think it’s just a word, or a symbol or three letters put together. . . . But they were lynching people, hurting people for no good reason.”

…“I spray paint one racist thing and, suddenly, I become a racist? Just because I did it doesn’t mean I hate Jews, gay people or black people.”

He was standing before the judge, pleading guilty to a hate crime, but he would not admit that he harbored any hate.

…Behind her, Principal Burton was listening. He’d heard Joshua Shaffer’s attorney give a similar speech. When Matthew Lipp was sentenced, he would hear it then too. Tyler Curtiss had written it in a Facebook apology the day after the crime…

They all believed it was possible to do what they did without really meaning it.

Burton wanted to look them in the eye and say: “You did something very racist. How you don’t think you’re a racist, I don’t know.”

…He believed what possessed them to draw those words and symbols that night wasn’t a lack of knowledge, but something deeper, something ugly, something taught to them, consciously or unconsciously, along the way. If they couldn’t admit that now, maybe they never would. But it wasn’t his responsibility to educate them any more.

When it was Burton’s turn to speak at Seth’s sentencing, he didn’t say the word “racism.” He talked about all the people the crime had affected — the teachers crying in his office, the parents who pulled their kids out of his school, his daughter in tears, and for just a few moments, himself: “I know I give up my time, my effort, I give up my life for my students,” he said. “I think the only thing I am asking in return is just a little bit of respect.”

…[Burton] had to focus [this year] on his 1,200 current students: the LGBTQ kids who still felt isolated. The Jewish girl who told the local paper she still wishes she could transfer. Whoever was still scrawling swastikas on the bathroom stalls.

In the past year, he’d created a task force of diverse students to work on the school’s climate. Soon every freshman would go through an empathy workshop. And nearly 40 of his employees had spent the year meeting to discuss the book “Waking Up White,” a memoir of a white woman who comes to understand that racism is a system that she had been shaped by and contributed to her entire life without even realizing it. Maybe, he thought, that lesson would get passed on to Glenelg’s students…

I have no faith in a proper investigation.

The other day I came across this awesome program by accident (I don’t even remember what I was actually searching for, but on the several times I’ve looked for a program like this I’ve had no luck). It’s cool enough that I wanted to share it.

It’s called DesignDoll (website here) and it’s a program that lets you shape and pose a human figure pretty much however you want.

There’s a trial version with no expiration date that can be downloaded for free, as well as the “pro license” version priced at $79. I’ve only had the free version for two days so far, so I’m not an expert and I haven’t figured out all of the features yet, but I’ve got the basics down. The website’s tutorials are actually pretty helpful for the basics, as well. 

Here’s the page for download, which has a list of the features available in both versions.

There are three features the free version doesn’t have:

Can’t save OBJ files for export

Can’t download models and poses from Doll Atelier (a sharing site for users; note that the site is in Japanese, though)

It can’t load saved files

The third one means that if you make a pose, save it, and close the program, you can’t load that pose/modified model later. You have to start with the default model. I found that out when I tried to load a file from the day before (this is why reading is important…). Whether saving your modifications (and downloading models and poses) is worth $80 is up to you. 

But, the default model is pretty nice and honestly if all you’re looking for is a basic pose reference it should work fairly well as it is. Here’s what it looks like:

There’s a pose tag that lets you drag each joint into place and rotate body parts. The torso and waist can be twisted separately, and it seems like everything pretty much follows the range of movement it would have on an actual human.

Even the entire shoulder area is actually movable along with the joint! See, like how the scapular area of the back raises with the arm:

The morphing tag is one of the coolest features, in my opinion. It lets you pick and choose from a library of pre-set forms for the head, chest, arms, legs, etc. It has some more realistic body shapes in addition to more anime-like ones. Don’t like the options there? Mix a few to get what you want! Each option has a slider that lets you blend as much or as little as you want into the design. 

So you, too, can create beautiful things like kawaii Muscle-chan!!

The scale tag lets you mess with the proportions and connection points of different joints. This feature combined with the morphing feature not only allows more body shape variations, but it also means that you can do things like make a more digitigrade model if you want. (The feet only have an ankle joint, but for regular human poses that’s all that you really need, so whatever.)

Or you can make a weird chubby alien-like thing with giant hands and balloon tiddies if that’s more your thing.

The ability to pose hands to the extent it allows is far more than I could have hoped for from a free program. Seriously, you can change the position of each finger joint individually, as well as how spread out the fingers are from each other. Each crease on the diagram below is a point of movement, and the circles are for spread between fingers. 

And to make it a bit more convenient, there’s a library of pre-set hand poses you can pick from as well, and then change the pose from that if you like. 

In both versions, you can also import OBJ files from other places for the model to hold, like if you wanted to have them hold a sword or something.

That shaded ball on the left is your light source. You can see how moving the point changed the shadow cast.

Oh and all those other nifty looking things in that bottom bar there, yeah it’s what you think. You can change the model color to one of these presets or even customize your own palette.

Plus for all you lovely people who want something a little more simplified to use as a pose reference

Commissions are open permanently! Waitlist instead of slots. I will announce when I close it. Follow the link above for instructions.

Taika Waititi: Powerfully creative, Knows himself, Good humored, Takes his work and his relationships with other people seriously, Intentional as a creator

John Mulaney: Publicly supportive of his wife and other women in his life, Crafts humor without taking cheap shots at people, Supportive friend, Willing to laugh at himself yet confident

Andy Samberg: Uses platform and humor to publicly call out toxic masculinity and white privilege, Self-aware, Willing to cede the floor to others, Good friend

Will Smith: Very intentional about what type of actions he takes as a husband and father (if you haven’t watched him on The Red Table, you should), Good humored and professional, Dedicated to his craft putting in the hours and energy, Generous with his emotions and vulnerability, Responsive to others emotions and vulnerability

I read somewhere that one aspect of Toxic Masculinity is believing that being part of a “We” will erase the “I”; that selfhood is threatened by relationships with other people. It reads then that Healthy Masculinity (indeed, healthy people in general) create a “We” that enhances the “I”; that we can become more powerfully ourselves through relationships with other people.