Luna

My entry for the A Cave Like A Net DTIYS by @lennsart

Congratulations on your creative milestones, Lenn!!

I have had this composition idea in my mind since you posted the prompt. I’m so glad I finally got time to finish this!! (Read: I got COVID. Now I no longer have COVID but I don’t wanna work. I told my boss I still need time from work. I spent three days doing art instead heheheh.)

It's kinda funny that my favorite piece of art in a while is a legpreg related one. Anyway, Artfight is very fun.

Oh my

god

Based on an off-screen scene from Retired Assets 1-5 “Broken Things Can Be Mended Anew”

Process here and here

(The WIP name was Link Appleheart)

Alt version below:

it took some decades for the arts of acting and filmmaking to catch up to the potential that was in movies all along; stuff like microexpressions and silences and eyes, oh man people are SO much better at acting with their eyes than they were in the 40′s, or even the 70′s.

this is a charming little tableau, quirky and unexpected, but it’s a tableau. it lives in a box.

now, i usually watch action movies, and i didn’t think it was fair to compare an action movie with what appears to be an indoor sort of story, but i do watch some comedy tv. so i looked for a brooklyn 99 gif with a similar framing, intending to point out that the camera moves, and the characters aren’t stuck inside the box. but i couldn’t even find the framing. they literally never have all the characters in the same plane, facing the camera, interacting only within the staging area. even when they’re not traveling, they’re moving around, and they treat things outside the ‘stage’ as real and interact with them, even if it’s only to stare in delighted horror.

as for action, it took a while for the movies to figure out what, exactly they wanted to show us, and how to act it. here’s a comedy punch:

here, also, is a comedy punch:

the first one looks like a stage direction written on a script. the second one looks like your friends horsing around and being jerks to each other. the first one is just not believable. the physics doesn’t work. the reaction is fakey. everyone’s stiff. even the movement of the camera is kind of wooden. the second one looks real right down to the cringe of his shoulder, and the camera feels startled too.

Seriously, I used to work in a sound studio, and one series of projects required us to listen to LOTS of old audio recordings. Not of anything special - just people talking.

AND THEY TALKED LIKE THAT.

It was so fucking wild to hear just a couple of people being like,

“WELL HI THERE JEANINE, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?”

“OH, NOT TOO BAD, JOE, THOUGH MY HUSBAND’S BEEN AWAY ON BUSINESS FOR A FEW WEEKS AND I MISS HIM SOMETHING TERRIBLE.”

“WELL IT’S A HARD THING, JEANINE, BUT YOU’LL GET THROUGH IT.”

“WELL I SUPPOSE I’VE GOT TO, HAVEN’T I JOE?”

All in that piercing, strident, rapid-fire style we associate with the films of the era. If you’ve watched lots of old movies you can imagine the above in that speech pattern.

Obviously there were people with regional accents and who didn’t speak in a heightened manner, but they didn’t get to be on TV or in movies unless they were villains. (And usually the villains were putting it on, like Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock. Sure, he was Richard Attenborough, but he was brought up in the Midlands, and by the on-screen standards of the time, that was common.)

Before that scene in that movie, if an actor dropped a prop by accident, they would have re-shot the scene–because Brando mostly disappeared out of frame as he bent down to pick up the glove, and (as is explained above) movies were framed to keep the people in the scene in the frame. I

And that’s not a fault of the actors; they were all very capable of naturalistic film acting (yes, even Shatner) – as the later movies would bear out. It’s because they were acting for the small screen, not the big one.

Watch some Classic Dr Who. You may or may not notice it without watching for it, but every shot of the TARDIS is taken from the same angle.

The TARDIS was, at that time, a stage set. The camera was behind the fourth (Sixth?) wall. It was fixed. And most TV sets were built like this. They had a specific fourth wall and everything was filmed from that angle.

Fast forward to the new series, and you’ll see that the TARDIS is being filmed from different angles all the time, including following the actor around.

Three things have changed:

1. Cameras have become much smaller.

2. Set building for TV has developed as an art. Those early sets were built by people who were trained to build stage sets.

3. Overall technological improvement resulting in things being cheaper.

The TARDIS set that was just retired? Each of its walls was designed to slide out. So you could put the camera anywhere you wanted. Presumably this is the case with the new one too. They couldn’t imagine doing that back in the day. Nor could they afford the complexities of a set like that.

I always thought it was kind of stylized. But then I ended up in a weird part of YouTube one night and found someone’s home video of just walking aroud a 7-11 convenience store at midnight talking to people in Orlando, Florida. Just trying out their new camcorder for shits and giggles, talking to other customers, talking to the cashier, etc. And you know what? They all talked like a goddamn John Waters movie. It was the weirdest thing, like I was watching outtakes from The Breakfast Club or Say Anything. I expected one of the Cusacks to walk into frame any second.

B) This is still happening only now you can pick up people’s net accents. My friends with tumblrs have tumblr diction. My friends who only spend time on facebook for social media sound VERY different. People who use twitter heavily put emphasis on different things and have a different meme literacy (you all know the difference between the way greentext sounds and the way “RIP but I’m different” sounds).

You know how people now will end sentences with “Lol” to indicate they’re not mad (e.g. “I have to go now lol, Mom’s home”)? Yeah, we didn’t used to do that. We also used to have a sarcasm tag! I’m going to apologize to the people with screen readers and tell you I promise this is reasonably short. It looked like this:

“Yeah, well, Obama is a ~*~*~Muslim.~*~*~

The asterisk action tags used to be a non-ironic, non-cringey thing, too. Like this:

“NINA GUESS WHAT”

“What??? :D”

“(Typing notification)”

“*waits*”

The term “teal deer” to replace “TL;dr” was a thing. And, of course, in the early 2000s you had 13375p34k, which for younger folks was “leetspeak.” One is the Homestuck characters uses it, but it’s not just a quirk—people really talked like that.

Whos fucking oc is this vro? (Its me)

Apple!

Giving wild a chu chu as a pet....it squiggles

Their being gay,,, gay as FUCK

Extra doggie pics under cut!

One of the things I remember the most clearly is the oldest person in the group. Her name was Steelsong. She was a 40-something Dom with a sub whose name we knew even though we knew nothing else. She ran her own fanfic archive because the web was still handmade HTML and navigated in webrings and I’m pretty sure Google didn’t exist or was only barely, barely launched and not well known. She was kind and patient and we loved her. She treated everyone on the group with the respect given any adult, even though most of the rest of the world was still treating us like we were children. Not teenagers even, but children. She never once condescended to any of us, never made our youth a barrier to her respect, never treated us like we were incapable of being full people or like we were less than her because we were young.

I remember that she hosted our fanfiction, as absolutely terrible as it was (and I still have some of it, I am WELL aware of how cringingly terrible it is, just absolute nonsense garbage), right there alongside of other fic that was soul-achingly beautiful. Not a separate section for her friends or for kids, just right there like we were good enough to feature alongside other authors. I never once received crit from her that I didn’t ask for, only support. Only love. I am still writing today partly because Steel was so kind about our fic, fanfic and original.

I remember that when I started doing clay sculpture, she commissioned a tiny pair of dragons from me, to support me doing artwork. She sent a check my mom cashed for me, and my mom helped me mail it when it was finished. It broke in transit, and Steel assured me that she mended it and that it was still beautiful. It was a small gold dragon curled up with a small silver dragon.

I remember that her patience knew no bounds. I remember that she was there for us, regardless of reason. When we wanted to know silly things like what to do with a single AA battery, she answered. When we had serious questions about sex, she answered.  When we had questions about writing, she taught us. When one of our group members, a young gay teen in Australia, ended up in the hospital and then stopped making posts, and we all knew what had happened, she let us talk to her about it because we couldn’t go to our own parents, even though we had just lost a friend.

She was not a replacement to my parents, but she was an extra parent, in some ways. A friend, certainly, but someone that had been through more life than we had and was willing to pass on knowledge if we asked for it. Someone older that we trusted with things that were too uncomfortable to go to our parents or teachers or whatever about, because we already knew she wasn’t going to judge us or something, and that we would get an honest answer.

I don’t know why I’m remembering this so hard tonight, and I’m not sure if there’s a point to sharing this, except that I know she’s gone now. She was ill the last time we spoke, and her site went down a long time ago, and I miss her. She was a huge influence on my life, then and now. She was hope, for me, that life as an adult didn’t have to be boring, it wouldn’t have to mean giving up the things I loved and Becoming Only Responsible With No Fun. Her presence meant I had hope I could still write and play with friends even when I wasn’t ‘a kid’ anymore. And she’s gone, and I miss her, and I wanted to share her from the perspective of youth, and the perspective over twenty years later has provided me.

And I think of her, when people go off about older folks being in fandom with younger folks. I’m an older folks now, or at least middle aged folks because there are certainly folks older than me still, but I wasn’t always. I’ve been here since i was a younger folks, and I know how much Steel’s presence and support meant to me, how much she helped not just me but everyone on that group. And I think of the people saying older folks don’t belong in fandom, and that they shouldn’t interact with younger folks at all, and I just think… I can’t agree. I needed that kind of solid presence in my life back then and even at the age I am now, I need the folks older than me to stay. I want them here.

This post’s purpose is to highlight the individual efforts of those who have worked hard over the last month to allow this day of beautiful chaos to come once again into fruition and whose continued hard work allows us to run this event month on month. Your contributions are so welcome, so loved, and on behalf of the rest of the mod team I want to take the opportunity to say thank you to each and every one of you. So, thank you.

Here's my work from Novermber!

That month we did a dungeon crawling thing, with different teams. I made the signs for each team!

For February, we had the collab with @/recalled11 which I drew fairy for!