Danmaku Otaku

RUNNING IN SKIRTS! To get the FREE MONTHLY How to THINK When You Draw digital MAGAZINE (including NEW tutorials, a YEAR before they appear online!) just send “Magazine, please!” to [email protected]

Net Neutrality is in DEEP Trouble

Reposted from Facebook’s PBS Newshour.

Now that I got your attention with this video…

The FCC decided to go ahead with the vote to remove the Net Neutrality rules that the Obama administration set up. 

As you can see, this is what the major ISPs wants to do if they have their way. This can do a few things:

Stiff new innovations, making it harder for smaller companies to compete.

Silence independent voices. 

Potentially putting up a “walled garden” on a wide scale.

Make distribution of information harder for low-income people.

Imagine this website, if you will, only working on Verizon networks while AT&T customers are charged a little extra, or have slower access to the same information.

Remember, your ISP owns content providers and may give top-shelf, VIP treatment to their own things while stiffing everyone else. We need to address this.

Now, some of you may recall earlier this year that John Oliver and a lot of other people, companies (and yours truly) did a rallying cry to tell the FCC to back off the Net Neutrality rules, which resulted in millions of comments on their proposal. 

However, there’s been a few problems… in short, it seems that the FCC chose to not listen due to “inconsistancies”.

Sidenote: Tumblr isn’t the best place to talk “long-form” so if you’re interested in looking at these notes, here are some places to go to.

https://medium.com/@AGSchneiderman/an-open-letter-to-the-fcc-b867a763850a - “ Specifically, for six months my office has been investigating who perpetrated a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC’s notice and comment process through the misuse of enormous numbers of real New Yorkers’ and other Americans’ identities. Such conduct likely violates state law — yet the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence in its sole possession that is vital to permit that law enforcement investigation to proceed.”

https://twitter.com/BanditRandom/status/933066570741383169 - A twitter thread about how the Wall Street Journal collected someone’s information to sign in FAVOR of Net Neutrality. 

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/fake-net-neutrality-comments-at-heart-of-lawsuit-filed-against-fcc/ - “Fake” net neutrality comments at heart of lawsuit filed against FCC

So, what can we do about this?

There are a few things you can do to help slow down this nightmare situation.

You can’t just “like” this note, you have to reblog to spread, but more importantly, you have to TAKE action!

1) Make calls to your representatives - https://5calls.org/issue/defend-fcc-net-neutrality - this website will tell you who to call and an easy-to-follow script so that you know exactly what to say.

2) You can support groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU and Free Press who are fighting to keep Net Neutrality:

https://www.eff.org/

https://www.aclu.org/

https://www.freepress.net/

https://www.fightforthefuture.org/

https://www.publicknowledge.org/

https://www.demandprogress.org/

3) You can add a comment to the proposal using John Oliver’s URL at http://www.gofccyourself.com

4) Write a letter to your representative. Not an email, an actual, snail mail letter. 

Let’s all band together and do something about this. Our future of sharing information, building innovation, nurturing voices and creativity depends on your actions now! 

I’m the Original Poster and I did my best to keep this brief with sources you can see for yourself.

However, with misinformation being a thing, I decided to amend to this to give you some extra pointers as to why I was specific about these steps and not recommend things like strictly writing to the FCC. 

1) Calling your reps and writing them is more effective than doing it via email. It’s been stated over, and over, and over again. Sadly, letters and phone calls are more effective.

2) Signing a petition can help, but without a way to verify you, it can be just as useful as shouting on Twitter (and will they look at Twitter? Nope.) It’s not totally useless, but it will not totally do the job.

See, if the FCC can use “bots” as an excuse (look at the sources in the original post), what makes you think a senator and representatives won’t? This is why “calling your rep” is the first action step and “writing your reps” is the last. 

3) Regardless, the non-profit organizations’ job (the one I posted about) is to spread awareness BEYOND YOUR NETWORK. Think of them as a private army you’re recruiting for this one mission. You can only tell so many people and some of you don’t live in the United States, which makes it even harder! 

4) BTW, you’re not just talking about this on Tumblr, are you? You have to talk to people on your other social networks as well. They are affected by things as well. Don’t want to talk? Post a link to here and let me do the talking for you. 

5) While I have done the research for you, please do your own in conjunction with this. That way, you can be better informed, especially when talking about this to other people.

6) Oh and one more thing since I did neglect this in my last post. I forgot to post the “deadline” - the actual day they will vote. Well…

We have until December 14, 2017!

So, let’s mobilize! Organize! Transform and roll out!

Okay, maybe not the last one…

But make the calls to your reps! Scroll up and do your part, no matter which side you’re on!

IF EVERYONE THINKS “EVERYONE ELSE” IS DOING THE WORK, THEN NO ONE IS.

1. Ah Fai was a chief animator for McDull’s animated features. He’s super cool. Ultimate senpai. 

2. Previous post on breakdowns right here 

Some thoughts on acceleration and force

I presented this in the order of how I slowly understood the trick of delivering force - first an abstract concept of impact taught by Ah Fai, then a more complicated discovery on the acceleration pattern, last back to a more abstract concept of breakdowns. 

Like I’ve previously stressed, 2D animation is everything but one single approach. There’s no one rule that rules them all, but interchangeable ideas with math, or physics, or music, etc. There’s no “perfect” animation either, but what is perceived as organic and dynamic. E.g., using the Fibonacci numbers to animate didn’t bring me a perfect animation! On the other hand, a tiny change in the pattern could already make the feeling of force so much more powerful. 

A growing collection of animated Pixel Art Tutorials by Pedro Medeiros (@saint11) of Studio Miniboss (they previously worked on TowerFall and are currently working on Celeste and Skytorn)

All +40 Pixel Art Tutorials can be found on blog.studiominiboss.com/pixelart (10 Pixel Art Tutorials are posted below)

Thanks a ton, I’m glad you dig it! And congrats on getting into that arts program too! Kinda had to rack my brains a little here being asked for advice and all, I’m hardly an expert and I’m always looking at my own stuff and fretting over how I could make it better. I guess I couldn’t tell you much that a good book or better artist couldn’t, but I’ll pretend I know what the heck I’m talkin’ about for a little bit to save face, haha. This’ll be a chatty one so apologies for that!

–My biggest tip actually doesn’t have much to do with the physical process of drawing cartoons, but more the inspiration end of it! I think it’s obvious that people that are into toons grew up on a healthy diet of ‘em, be it your Jay Ward or Ub Iwerks, Hanna-Barbara or Disney or Warner Bros. I myself grew up with my dad’s huge bootleg VHS collection in the 80s and loved watching the old Looney Tunes (and their direct inspirations, Three Stooges and Marx Bros. and Laurel and Hardy and whatnot) and come the 90s I was all about Tiny Toons and Animaniacs. In fact, that Sammy character I draw, I’ve been doodling her since about 1995. Guess what she looked like!

Heeyy, embarrassing! But as I got older the big thing I learned was that expanding your pool of artistic inspiration does a ton for you. Inspiration isn’t necessarily “I like what this artist does, so I’ll just draw like that artist!” It’s about what you learn from their craft and how you can translate that into your own way of drawing. I fell in love with cartoonists like Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe (you may know him from doing character design in Disney’s Hercules!), and German Expressionism artists like Otto Dix, who showed me that the way you craft your linework can be a powerful emotional force. I’m a big fan of Russian Constructivism, where you learn simple shapes and good composition can convey information even when it’s abstracted, and then you can apply that theory to master graphic artists like Paul Rand and Saul Bass.

–With that out of the way, a big thing to keep in mind when drawing toony is to keep it simple! This doesn’t mean you can’t buck that idea a bit when you’ve gotten good at it of course, but still the central idea is clarity and elegant simplicity of form–the anatomy of your average toon ain’t too complex, just a lot of shapes. Some of the most well known cartoon characters are ones whose constructions are so stripped down that they become iconographic in a way, and one can easily recognize a character even from a simple silhouette. For gamers, this was design philosophy for the characters in Team Fortress 2, where being able to know what class of character coming at you from a distance is helpful to the player. The characters all have their little accessories and all that, but overall their shapes are crisp and distinct. So you take a figure, strip it down to its components so only the important bits are left–Pablo PIcasso did an amazing print series exploring this concept. This was necessary in animation both because it made things easier to deal with in production, and because it simply looks better to the eye when you’ve got these characters moving and doing all this wacky stuff. As a reference for someone that’s amazing at simplifying figures in a beautiful way, I’d check out Charley Harper.

–That’s the overall shapes, but for linework I like to think back to when I was working as a caricature artist under Gary Fasen. His big thing was what he called line economy; i.e., when you’re drawing something cartoonish, it’s imperative that that every line you put down ought to be doing something. Superfluous lines do little else but muddle or confuse a drawing when you’re working with character that don’t even need a lot of lines to begin with–lines are information, and cartoons are like a practical phone call. Say what needs to be said and be done with it! One guy that was a master with this stuff was Al Hirschfeld, god-tier caricature artist who was able to successfully convey a distinct human face and body while using minimalist, gorgeously flowing lines, making sure each one is pulling their weight.

–Of course, one of the big things in cartoons is to exaggerate! We love cartoons just because of how wonderfully weird the dang things look, and don’t ever feel like you need to hold back when you’re just messing around. I know at Pixar one thing they like to say is that if you’ve got an idea that you think pushes the envelope, best thing to do isn’t to dial it back but to crank it up to 11. When you’re in the design process, why not go for broke, really? It’s better for you to have gone a little nuts, come back later and go “eehh I’ll shave that back a little bit” than to never have pushed yourself at all, not knowing that your character design might have benefited from it. A couple films that have just hilariously exaggerated animation and character design (and, as it happens, successfully do all the other things I’ve been yammering about) are probably pretty well known to animation buffs, but they are for a reason, ainna? Check out Triplets of Belleville and the fan-made “Recobbled” version of Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler. The way they exaggerate the human form is just beautifully bizarre!

–Finally, more important than any of this is to loosen up and have some damn fun! Art suffers from hesitation and self-consciousness, and that translates into stifled ideas, lines that lack confidence, color palettes that aren’t as weird and funky as they could be! Move your arm. Draw a sweeping line that flows from a character’s head right to their toes and build around it. Toons always have fun, shouldn’t you?

The Youtube user Nick Slick Wilde just got his channel back.

If you don’t know who that is, it’s a Youtuber that’s been stealing art and reposting them on Youtube, he’s even been earning money from it.

I will say it now. I HAVE NOT ALLOWED ANY PERMISSION FOR THIS CHANNEL TO REPOST MY ART, NOR USE IT FOR ANY PROFITABLE USE.

This is utterly disgusting that he’s allowed to keep doing this and still defend his motives towards his channel.

The artists that he stole from include:

@mistermead

@ky-jane

@red-velvet-panda

Me (He removed mine, but he might bring it back on since the counter

@nicolaswildes

@trashasaurusrex

@spintherella

And a lot more.

This is fucking bullshit. I can’t believe this is happening again. I honestly don’t care if he uses my work, but if he’s earning money, then no.This crosses the line.

On top of this he frequently makes harassing, racist comments, makes threats to hack people, to kill people, and plenty of other ridiculous things.

I’ve reported him plenty. So all that’s left now is to ask that his subscribers drop him. Don’t support this creep.