Nanashi Jones: Personally Anyone

I drew this for my batfamily fantasy au that I wanna write a fic for but….the chances of that happening aren’t exceptionally likely knowing myself. More about stephcass in this au under the line if you’re interested

This post talks about a new DM feature in youtube. What it fails to mention is that as part of this new feature is that when you send someone a link to a video, and they open it in the youtube app, they will see who sent them the link. Specifically, your channel name.

If your google account name is your real name, so is your channel name by default.

This means the new default behavior is that everyone you send a youtube link to will see your full name if they open it in the mobile app.

To turn this off:

Go to your youtube app settings

Go to Privacy

Turn off "Channel visibility for shared links"

Gargoyle character studies I had on my Patreon for a while now, featuring Brooklyn, Broadway, Lexington, and Angela! :)

These were largely a bid in trying to capture the likeness of the characters while translating them into my style. As seen with Angela's sheet: what I did was take the official character model sheet and trace it to get a feel of their base character shapes, then did a second pass over the trace to add the features I wanted to incorporate into my headcanon design.

The final iteration (the big colored ones) is entirely freehanded and drawn using my passes as reference. I like how they all came out! :>

I'll eventually do the same with other characters (Elisa, Demona, Goliath, and Hudson are next on my list), then do fullbody redesigns to act as refs for any future drawings and headcanons I make for Gargoyles.

Discworld Textposts III

I was lying in bed last night, sometime after midnight, and my brain kept chewing on the idea that some kinds of "discourse" just seem to come up again and again and again.

(this is where I got Miss Shirley Bassey's History Repeating stuck in my head on a loop)

My theory about why it happens is clumsy and poorly articulated and needs a lot of work and has probably been done better by other people before, but it's lodged in my head, so let's dive in. Just know that i'm stereotyping here to a degree I don't like, but I don't yet have a better way of getting the idea across.

Okay, so a lot of people enter fandom in their teen years*. This is also a period of time when they're becoming more socially conscious and politically aware and just actively expressing their opinions to others. They're being exposed to a lot of ideas - both in fandom spaces and outside of them - and some of those take root and become passionate beliefs.

Examples of these beliefs might be:

old people shouldn't participate in fandom

writing about rape or child abuse makes you a rapist or a child abuser

only bad writers use the word "said" all the time in their dialogue tags

You get the idea.

Whatever the take is, they get really loud about it because it has become a core belief and they are passionate. Older people or people more versed in fandom or people with the opposite opinion argue with them about their take. Everything becomes chaos and drama and fighting and hurt feelings for a while, and then it settles down.

Until it all starts up again.

When I was in my 20s and 30s, I would see the resurgence of these worn out arguments, and I'd think "we already talked about this. why are you all bringing it up again?"

Because I was thinking of the situation like a normal distribution curve:

But I think it's actually more of a sine wave:

Because the thing about 16 year olds or new members of fandom or whatever the core group is that I'm attempting to talk about is that there's a new batch of them every single year. They just keep making more of them.

And for those new people, the conversation hasn't happened yet. They haven't talked about it, argued about it, blocked people or made friends because of it. They haven't discussed the history of the last five rounds of this same conversation yet. They weren't here last time.

And that's why it actually makes sense that the same discourse and wank come up over and over again. Every time the conversation flares up, you'll catch all of the, say, 14 to 18 year olds who are currently active in fandom. You'll catch the people who have started participating online in fandom spaces in the last year or two.

Have the discourse. Enjoy a few years of detente. Have the discourse again. It's the circle of... strife? There's probably a better pun there, but I couldn't find it.

Anyway, there isn't really a huge point to this massively long post beyond just me realizing why it seems like I've been on this merry-go-round a few too many times already. That's just the joy of getting older. I've seen a lot of things more than once now. But thinking about it this way helps me contextualize why the conversation is never over.

We have to keep talking about these things because there are always people who are just learning it for the first time. I'm on the other side of the xkcd 10,000 People comic.

Not that we should, but it just struck me while reading this that a lot of the point of formal education in a subject is precisely to avoid that sine wave effect. At school and university, students are taught which arguments have taken place previously and what the consensus on the answer was (if consensus has been reached) or at least which solutions were disproved. This sets the baseline for a shared understanding in the field and thus nobody wastes their time passionately advocating for phlogiston.

Fandom is, by contrast, self-taught. We're expected to pick everything up from context clues and peer-to-peer discussion, and from people whose credentials as 'experts' don't come with third-party validation. This has the advantage of meaning fandom doesn't feel like being at school again (always a plus for a leisure activity) but inevitably creates a non-zero chance of passionate phlogiston advocacy from those who don't (yet) know the full picture.

“Olha, eu não quero ser aquele que diz ‘eu bem que avisei’ mas…”

“Você também quer uma jaqueta, né?”

This movie got made because Robin Williams said yes to it (and it's important that Gene Hackman did as well). Williams in the 90s was a mega-star of a type that's not present in the current media environment (maybe Tom Cruise, but I personally think that's echo from his salad days). Even his flops made money on the back end in the video rental market, which also doesn't exist anymore (streaming is different). Hackman was on the other side of his A-list career but still Hollywood nobility if not full royalty.

Playing gay was considered career suicide in the 90s. There had been a number of actors who put lie to that belief stretching back decades, but this was Williams and Hackman (yes, being on screen next to a gay character was enough to get you blacklisted) saying "screw that" and doing it anyway.

Being gay and out was career suicide in the 90s.

Nathan Lane had a really nice gig going for himself. The Lion King put him into the Disney rep company with people like Williams, Bette Midler, and Whoopie Goldberg (check their IMBD list from the 90s--they were making bank at Disney).

Lane didn't come out until several years later (nice summary: https://deadline.com/2024/06/nathan-lane-robin-williams-advice-coming-out-birdcage-1235975010/).

I don't want to imply that this was a Sorkinized moment where everything changed because of one thing, but this was a very important movie that caused real movement in the needle on queer acceptance.