#fudgemutt

POV: you're a simple workin class guy just tryna live ur best life at a coffeeshop and you walk into the bathroom and find a feral 13 year old has absolutely obliterated a grown ass man and looks sickly as fuck

Ah! Hello! First of all, yay!! I’m so happy to hear that you’ve been thinking of learning ASL! As I’m sure you gathered from my many tags, ASL is a truly beautiful language and I think more folks could benefit from learning it, or even just having some basic signs in their back pocket. :) However, necessary disclaimer: I am hearing and not Deaf, so do please take all my advice with a grain of salt. I only took 1 year of ASL lessons in-person, so I have only a very basic understanding of ASL. (I had been planning to take more classes and then the pandemic hapened... and yet even with my minimal exposure, I have found my small bit of ASL knowledge to be super helpful/useful! so I do believe that having any knowledge is better than none)

Another thing I want to say is... it might be difficult to properly learn ASL online (but definitely not impossible!). Just as for any other language, it’s important to be able to practice communicating and to receive feedback on your sign production. There are certain nuances that come with ASL being a signed language (versus a spoken language), such as body posture and hand positioning, and these may not be obvious until you are actually engaging in a face-to-face signed conversation. It was also very important to our professor that we learn about Deaf history and be exposed to Deaf culture, so that we were more aware of the context ASL exists in... just a few things to be aware of before taking your dive into learning. :)

Ok - now that I’ve said all that, I do have some resources for you that folks have mentioned to be helpful/informative! (Note: most of these resources are for right-handed folks, so if your dominant hand is your left, you may have to reverse some signs.)

Assuming we’re starting with zero ASL knowledge, you may want to start by getting familiar with the alphabet: 

- video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkMg8g8vVUo

- handchart: http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/topics/wallpaper1.htm

Now, the best resource I can probably offer to you is “ASLUniversity” (https://lifeprint.com/). From what I can tell, it is run by Dr. Bill Vicars, who is Deaf, and it has entire lesson videos for free!

You may want to start with: “ABC’s in ASL,” where he teaches a student how to do basic fingerspelling (your ABC’s) in real time, so you can see his corrections on what not to do and how it should properly be done. Fingerspelling is a super important skill and takes a lot of practice, so that’s a great way to start!

His lesson 01 is with a student who already knows how to fingerspell, so once you have a basic grasp on that, I recommend going there and then following through lesson-by-lesson!  His website also includes a video dictionary, so you can find the basic signs for “hello,” “thank you,” etc. and things you can use immediately in casual conversation. 

Additionally, he has a video going through a 100 basic signs (I find that it might go very fast for a beginner), but feel free to check that out as well! https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/concepts.htm

Rules: share your most recent line from your WIP (any WIP) and tag the same amount of people as there are sentences.

Well, here's my most recent paragraph, enjoy!

After dark Diego swims to the surface, and throws the bottled message through the lighthouse window.

One tag to spend wisely.....hmmm. @flecket I'm coming for you!

15. I've had a lot of weird stuff happen to me. Of course I can't remember a whole lot of them when I need to, thanks brain. But this one is pretty weird for me.

During pre-finals last spring, I ended up pulling a multiple all nights. It was a saturday, and I was about to go to bed at like 8 in the morning. I was lying awake under the covers, so tired I couldn't sleep, just staring at the ceiling. The all of a suddenly I was sitting on my bed, feet on the ground, my covers made up, and I was actively scrolling through my phone at. It was now noon.

I wanted to assume I slept I've, but I felt as exhausted and tired as I had been when I had laid down earlier. And I also tend to remember when I wake up and remember stuff I do when I'm half awake. l've only sleepwalked once in my life when I was ten and I didn't do anything at sophisticated as making my bed, or unplugging a phone, turning it on and open an app and start scrolling. So while I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure I blacked out for a few hours. Luckily I didn't see to have done anything else.

I ended up sleeping through the rest of the day.

Moral of the story, please sleep. You need sleep.

44. Yes, I've had collections of lots of stuff over the years. I used to collect rocks, shells, Littlest Pet Shop toys, Monster High dolls (I regret getting rid of those), Funko Pops (I regret collecting those), and ceramic dog figurines.

I was never intense about any of these, it was just fun for me. I have remenants of all these, and fond memories.

Questions for gif-makers ask game

14. I wish there was an easy answer to this but there’s so many things that affect time. One day I swear I’ll do like a speed gif process video or something to show how many things there are.

> Find footage (ie. scroll through 20 episodes of TUA finding one or more scenes/clips dependent on the theme)

> Cut and clean footage. Narrow down the few seconds or minutes needed into one or more shortened clips (which I refer to as stock). Some gif makers might do this slightly differently but I use a script based editor so I clean my stock when I cut it, rather then after. There’s a lot of little technical stuff I don’t need to babble about here. Either way this takes a *long* time, but part of the blame on that is my weak laptop. A lot of waiting around, which is extended if I’m cutting in 2160p/4k. Longer stuff I’ll use a good 1080p for the sake of my sanity.

> Load into PS, and preliminary editing, I decide size and shape, and fine tune the frames/video/speed, cutting it into smaller gifs sometimes.

> Lighting, colouring, sharpening and any further cleaning. The more fun stuff of giffing that I like. If this is a simple set like of Rob Sheehan looking sexy and nothing else, skip to encoding once satisfied.

> For specialty sets, with special effects, textures, timing effects, any and all weird things you sometimes see my gifs do, all of that is done here. Add several hours to the project depending on how well I know what I’m doing, if I’m winging it or not. Sometimes, like writing and drawing or other art, you go through a bit of trial and error and scrap things until it works tho. Sometimes I have a clear design in my head. It all depends, but either way its fairly labour intensive on the usual. 

> Encoding. THE WORST. Equally tedious as processing and de-interlacing, but again, a lot of this may be my crap computer and poor RAM, which photoshop eats like it’s its job. This can take anywhere from 5-45 minutes per gif, it sucks. Then once it finishes and alows you to save, I usually find problems that need tweaking, mainly if the size exceeds tumblr’s limit, or timing errors or any number of fixes.... so you have to go back edit, try again, and see what comes out lmao. The life.

So I dunno if writing it out like that gives you an idea of the time. Definitely some of it is on my slow computer so I might sound melodramatic that it takes centuries to do, ‘cause not always lmao.

So in the end, simple cut and colour sets maybe a couple hours depending on if it’s 4 or 8 or 10 right, and artsy/specialty sets vary greatly, but it’s usually upwards of 5 hours, or more but spread out over a couple days (I hyperfixate and tend to try and finish in one sitting like a lunatic sometimes tho.)