TheFrogAndTheCamera

request by @wishyoudwell

National Moon Day (U.S.)

International Moon Day (Planet Earth)

Moon day celebrates the historic Apollo 11 mission which culminated with a landing on Earth's moon, 20 July 1969.

This is the Project Apollo insignia, adopted in 1965.

The name "Apollo" for the U.S. project to land an astronaut on the moon and return the astronaut safely to earth was suggested by NASA's Abe Silverstein, referring to Apollo's chariot, which traverses the sky each day. The face on the golden moon represents Apollo. The art seems to have been a collaboration by several NASA employees and contract workers.

Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_program.svg

Image license:  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International 

Read more:

https://science.nasa.gov/resource/apollo-mission-patches/

Actual quotes from the Apollo 11 mission:

and when it released for ios? holy fuck were they DROWNING in money. when they took a weekend to put the game on sale for a dollar, down from five, a couple months after release, they made as much in that one weekend as they did since its release. it was among the top paid apps for weeks.

with critics, peggle was among some of the top downloadable, mobile, and general best games of all time at the time of its release in 2007 and onwards, and it only shot up in popularity as they made it more accessible to more people. and this was in a time before candy crush.

the thing about simple addictive puzzle games is that they make you feel competent, confident, smart, and cool for being good at them. not everybody can learn how to aim in a shooter or the best strategy in an rpg. but anybodys grandmother or baby brother can play a simple puzzle game, and the nature of these games and the way they make you feel only makes you want to play more and more.

however very very fucking few people who play simple puzzle games that you can master on the toilet would be going to E3 in the early 2010s. remember in 2012 when every ~hardcore gamer~ would screech about ‘fake gamers’ who only play candy crush? thats what peggle was. it was THE crack mobile game from the pre-candycrush era.

no one who was excited about peggle was going to E3. the hundreds of thousands of people who played peggle were not the type of people who would consider going to (or even giving a shit about) E3.

but it sold like hot cakes, and candy crush was churning out content like a madman, and EA owned popcap now, so because the game sold amazingly, and because they wanted to keep cashing in on it, and because corporate drones who controlled the scripts didnt comprehend that their consumerbase isnt one homogeneous mass, they decided to announce peggle 2 at E3 2013.

but not just “oh by the way peggle 2”, no. peggle sold like skyrim, it sold like black ops, clearly they should be saving the best for last, they should announce it like it was the craziest most incredible announcement of the night!

thus:

Mattel making Monster High: So yeah we'll do a fashion doll line themed around halloween monsters and goth fashion and little girls will love it because little girls love creepy things but don't get to indulge in it often, and like with our other doll lines (BARBIE HACK HACK) we will create movies and tie-in books and hell, even an animated TV show with fun character dynamics so the kids get attached to the characters and wanna buy the dolls. It will teach little girls to be kind and brave and good friends and is set in high school so they have something to aspire to. We can even make lore about all the different types of monsters and their cultures and they can go on fantastical adventures in between their slice of life stories. Good clean spooky fun, nothing too complicated!

This is not to say Monster High doesn't have dark themes and doesn't explore complicated issues. Gil and Lagoona have racist families that hurt their relationship, and that theme is expanded upon even more with Freaky Fusion where the hybrid monsters are outcasts due to their mixed heritage. Monsters and normies are segregated due to years of fearmongering and hatred against monsters, and it leads to some genuinely scary things like Holt Hyde getting locked up that one time. I'm not as encyclopedically well-versed in Monster High as I am in Ever After High, but I'm pretty sure that guy Valentine is also a look at toxic abusive relationships.

The point here isn't that Monster High is worse or that it's sanitized. The point is that those issues are more secondary to the main plots of the ghouls and their friendships. Monster High, despite being a show about Halloween monsters, has a more realistic down-to-earth tone because the point is for kids to see their lives in these characters and possibly learn how to deal with their own problems by watching. Which means of course Monster High touches on pretty intense real-world problems, but it doesn't REVOLVE around them the way EAH does.

In Ever After High, the central focus IS on the dystopian themes and the friendships and day-to-day lives of the characters come second to the oppression of the destiny system. It isn't secondary or subtle at all, it's the main attraction of the story. This is made even funnier by the fact that Monster High is the one with the "creepy" "dark" "gothic" aesthetics, but tends to have a lighter tone while EAH is the pastel fairytale princess world, but has this overwhelming focus on the grim worldbuilding (pun unintended, but welcome).

One summer's eve

watercolour on arches paper cold pressed