RiddleAugust

“Freedom always has a price.”

this is emmett and cullen they are best friends

Dog: :) fine, thanks

Wait hang on I got in trouble for League bara on Twitter? This is a fascinating bit of my lore that I was not aware of! Granted, I have tried actively to purge Twitter from my consciousness, so I've probably just forgotten, but this one I kind of want to remember.

What happened? What did I do? I'm genuinely fascinated to know!

Anyway, as I've said before, I'm not really a furry, claiming that would kind of be stealing valor, I've just been around enough of them that a fursona manifested autonomously, and I used to take commissions from furries among other clients.

the cold season Jan-Apr:

Tumblrites, the hour has come for us to practice one of our most sacred rituals.

Bounce light is something I didn't cover but I adore it!

Gamut Mask

(image via )

James Gurney is an absolute master and gives really good clarity on colour techniques. Yes, it is traditional paint focused, but the principles are the same. Yes it is informed by the environmental colour but as a painting technique it is achieved this way!

While it's not super important to know about the mathematical side of blend modes, I think it's worth knowing at least enough about how each of the categories of blend modes works and why they do what they do; if for no other reason than having a starting point when you start experimenting with them in your work.

An overview of the basic blend modes and how they work from Genevieve's Design Studio: Accessible with minimal color knowledge; practical and illustration focused. https://youtu.be/kMc87hQrJd0?si=TWCB365pKSfWS8p0. (16 minutes) This creator also has a ton of free resources you can download, including a Blend Modes cheatsheet, but fair warning: you have to create an account to get them!

Walnut was born in a species-recovery breeding program in the 1980′s.  The program had crane chicks hand-raised by human volunteers, and at that time they did not fully understand the measures necessary make sure that the chicks do not imprint on humans and retain their identity as cranes.  

As a result, her keepers believe, Walnut does not recognize other cranes as members of her own species.  

It has not been proven that Walnut killed her previous suitors; however, there is a persistent rumor in the white-naped-crane-conservation community that she did.  

Because this species is highly endangered, and the gene pool of the captive population is small, it’s pretty important for the survival of her species that Walnut A) mate, and B) not kill a bunch of other cranes.  

The actual name of the keeper is Chris Crowe.

They both arrived at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in 2004.   

Walnut immediately began paying special attention to Chris--and ignoring the eligible male crane in a nearby enclosure.  

Walnut initiated their courtship, performing the opening moves of a mating dance.  

Chris realized that if he reciprocated the mating dance, it might be possible to artificially inseminate Walnut with her participation and consent.  (The process normally involves restraining the bird.)  

It worked!  

Chris and Walnut have had five children, who were raised by other crane couples at the facility--sometimes the biological dad and his mate--both because it’s unclear whether Walnut would accept the chicks as her own, and because Chris is not equipped to be a Crane Dad.  

However, the Institute provides her with artificial eggs to sit on, and Chris takes his turn looking after them.  (This would not work with real eggs because he can’t sit on them properly, but Walnut seems to feel that he is on the job if he just stands over them.)

she has not been PROVEN to have killed her exes, but there is a PERSISTENT RUMOR (really officers she's simply DEVASTATED, she sobs, wearing a new feather boa unfortunately resembling her most recent deceased husband)

His name is Chris CROWE. (Mrs. Walnut Crane-Crowe?)

the mental images of a whole human man learning and performing the crane mating dance, and "sitting" on artificial eggs so she thinks he's performing his duties as a husband and father (and apparently OBJECTS if he does not?)

"chris, buddy, you gotta marry the possibly-murderous crane lady for the GOOD OF THE SPECIES." (alternately: "chris, my man! good news! we found you a very interested lady! She's 36, she's very spirited and independent, she holds a very important and rare status in her society! ...Is there a downside? WELL...")

Reddit user ChunkArcade said of Benguiat:

I had Ed Benguiat as a teacher in college. Absolute legend. He used to smoke in class (looonggg past when smoking indoors was illegal in NY), tell us stories for 75% of the class, then randomly drop gems of typographic genius that I still use on a daily basis at work. Such a good soul and a fucking REBEL.

Originally the letters were intended to form part of a logo for a friend's business, but when the logo was rejected, Benguiat decided to continue working on it and turned it into a font. It was one of approximately ten billion fonts Benguiat designed.

ITC Benguiat is often described as an "Art Nouveau" font, but Benguiat denied this:

When I designed this font I was not thinking “Art Nouveau” style. My thought was just to create a beautiful font that would fit the need for a highly readable serifed font.

The font includes a number of ligatures, like AR, LA, SS, and TT, which are rarely used in practice.

One of the many places ITC Benguiat ended up being used was on book covers in the late 70s and 80s:

A well-known recent use of ITC Benguiat is in the Stranger Things logo, which is widely claimed to be based on the covers of Stephen King novels.

But... I can't actually find any Stephen King novels with ITC Benguiat on the cover? Classic Stephen King novels actually used a modified version of Pacella Latina for his name and the title, and Korinna for smaller text. (Image below from avperth on Flickr.)

Korinna and ITC Benguiat do look kind of similar, but Korinna was never used for titles. The only real similarity between Stranger Things and (some of) these covers is the way that the first and last letters of "StepheN" and "StrangeR" are bigger than the others.

I mean look at this shit:

Are people blind? That's not the same font! Look at the E, look at the G! Look how thin the verticals of the N are! Just because they're both red doesn't mean they're the same font.

"It graced the cover of countless Stephen King novels", but they couldn't find a single example because none of these covers actually used ITC Benguiat (nor do they all use the same fonts as each other). They are right about Choose Your Own Adventure books using it, though: