asolleeeeeeee

Cities - go near water!  freshwater lakes and rivers (rivers especially) are the best places for cities because A) source of water and B) travel and trade is much easier cus you can put your boats like right there.  Basically ever relevant city ever was built on a lake or a river.

for rivers in general - because gravity, rivers run from mountains (forming from melting snow and ice (this is why they get fat in spring–more stuff melting)) to lakes/ocean where they can empty out (and even lakes will have rivers leading out that eventually get to the ocean), which can help when mapping out where those start and end.  rivers are also much thinner and faster in steeper elevations and very slow and wide when the land is flat

mountains - i like to think of what the tectonic plates look like because that’s what makes mountains!  mountains are also never standalone they’re always in mountain ranges (archipelagos are really just underwater mountain ranges babey).  a cool trick I like to do is occasionally separate mountain ranges across continents, because over time the tectonic plates shifted and literally split the range in half.  These mountains are really old tho so they’ve eroded and therefore it makes them smaller and rounder (like the appalachians) as opposed to relatively young mountain ranges like the rocky mountains which have taller and sharper peaks

Another mountain trick: if your mountains run along the ocean, the ocean side of the mountains will get a LOT of rain while the other side will be very dry–almost desert-like, in fact.  think of temperate rainforests in British Columbia vs the drier conditions in the canadian prairies

forests - depends on how warm the area might be.  coniferous forests are found further north (before you hit the tree line, and then it’s only tundra onwards) but as you head south you get leafier trees, and the leaves tend to get larger too

If you think about general elevation too, you’ll have places that might be swampy (wet + lower).  if your world has an ice age like we did, then glaciers may have carved the land, leaving piles of soil in the south that was left when the ice receded and places where the bedrock has been bared north of that (like the Canadian Shield in Canada–the reason we see that is because of the glaciers)

You might also have a land that’s dotted in a shitton of freshwater lakes as well because the meltwater filled the holes that the glaciers scraped out (this is why canada has so many goddamn lakes)

and if the ice age was more recent than it was in our world, then you might not even have the forest re-growth and it could be a lot of open plains

Though, for fantasy, you can make the world operate on entirely different principles:

With that done, the actual topic of city placement can be covered by videos like this:

Or

Once you have your places, if you want help naming them in realistic ways, this video can help:

This one is on architecture, which is definitely a subset of cities:

But for a more relevant practical guide on making settlements realistic:

Here’s a quick guide for making demographics:

The first time he cheated death, Sisyphus had just angered Zeus by revealing the location of the Asopid Aegina whom Zeus abducted. Which is super valid, fuck Zeus.

Sisyphus knew that Zeus would send the god of death Thanatos after him, so he prepared a trap and trapped Thanatos in the chains meant for him.

After that, nothing on Earth was able to die so long as Thanatos was in chains. Which meant no animals could be sacrificed to the gods. This angered the gods, who made Sisyphus' life so miserable with pain and illness that he would beg for death. And so he released Thanatos.

But then came the second time Sisyphus cheated death. As he was dying, he asked his wife to dump his naked corpse in the middle of the public square. Denied a proper burial, his soul ended up on the far side of the river Styx, unable to cross.

He complained to Hades and Persephone about how his wife disrespected him, and begged them to let him return briefly to the world of the living to scold her and make her bury him properly. They agreed, and Sisyphus returned to life. He then embraced his wife, and refused to return to the Underworld.

It's only when he finally died of old age that he was sent to Tartarus and punished with the boulder.

I don't remember where I've seen it, but I like the interpretation that Sisyphus doesn't have to push the boulder. He can choose to stay in Tartarus and rest. But he was promised that if he managed to push the boulder to the top of the mountain, he'll ascend to Elysium.

And Sisyphus, in his stubbornness and cleverness, refuses to give up on a challenge.

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Any rigid solid object is extremely challenging for 2D artists to animate because if one stray line isn’t kept perfectly in check, the object will seem to wobble and shift unnaturally.

Even as early as the mid 80’s Disney was using a technique where they would animate a 3D object and then apply a 2D filter to it. This practice could be applied to any solid object a character interacts with: from lanterns a character is holding, to a book (like in Atlantis), or in the most extreme cases Cybernetic parts (like in Treasure Planet).

But 101 Dalmatians was made WAY before the advent of this technology. So how did they do the Cruella car chase sequence at the end of the film?

The answer is so simple I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner:

They just BUILT the models and painted them white with black outlines 🤣

That was the trick. They’re not actually 2D animated, they’re stop motion. They were physical models painted white and filmed on a white background. The black outlines become the lineart lines and they just xeroxed the frame onto an animation cel and painted it like any other 2D animated frame.

That’s how they did it! Isn’t that amazing? It’s such a simple low tech solution but it looks so cool in the final product.

FUCK HARD

FUCK FAST

FUCK BADLY

NEVER USE GENERATIVE AI

CREATE JOY

MUSIC ALWAYS

PSPSPSPS AT KITTIES ON THE STREET

YUMMY SOUP

go see the doctor about that thing

BE TRANSGENDER

KISS YOUR FRIENDS

EAT CHEESE

NEVER KILL YOURSELF

Hi all. As promised, I am sharing a comprehensive .PDF of model sheets that were created for the Amblimation Cats movie that never saw the light of day. Most of these model sheets have not been published or posted anywhere on the internet as far as I'm aware. I'm going to get ahead of some questions for the good of the order:

Are these real? I certainly didn't sit and create all 117 pages myself for the sake of an elaborate hoax!

How did you get these? I work in the animation industry. A senior coworker caught wind of my cats obsession and said he had the Xeroxes and asked if I wanted him to bring them in. Internally, I flipped my shit. And then I digitized his hard copies.

How did your coworker get these? They were found in the library of the university he used to go to. (Not super unusual at an arts school in southern California.) He made photo copies back then and has been holding onto them. The thing is he knows nothing about CATS; isn't a CATS fan, never seen it, etc. I guess he just felt it was something worth holding on to!

Can you upload better quality? Unfortunately what you're seeing as good as the quality gets. These are scans of photocopies from the 90s. There is nothing to be done for the crunchiness.

What about (missing characters)? I'm showing you everything I was personally given!

Which character is (nondescript drawing of a cat)? If the image isn't labeled, your guess is as good as mine! I put all the misc./unlabeled cats in the back of the PDF. The only exceptions are ones that I felt were abundantly obviously supposed to be a specific character.

Who are the artists? Unfortunately, there's no way I can tell for sure. None of the sheets are signed. I wouldn't even go about guessing because many concept artists can perfectly emulate more "well known" illustrators whose styles were sought after. My coworker said he might be able to figure out who the draftsmen were; until then it's a mystery! If I find out, I will come back to this post and update it with that information.

Are these all the model sheets ever? No! In fact, there are model sheets that have been posted online that are not in the bundle I was given. I have no idea of the sum total of model sheets in existence.