amandaonwriting:

A Writer’s Rule Book

From Hunter’s Writing

stephenmccranie:

I’m sad how tumblr doesn’t let us talk much. Will you follow me on twitter? I’ll follow you back:

https://twitter.com/stephenmccranie

More comic essays like this can be read at:

http://doodlealley.com/

thespacegoat:

• Accidentally close a tab? Ctrl+Shift+T reopens it.
• Bananas release dopamine, eat them when you’re sad.
• CTRL+SHIFT+ESC is the one handed version of CTRL+ALT+DEL
• Don’t brush your teeth hard, it makes them sensitive and removes enamel.
• Don’t like spiders? Put citronella oil on your walls and they will not go there.
• Drink one glass of water for every alcoholic drink you have, you’ll get drunk without getting a hangover.
• Get clear ice cubes by boiling water before freezing it
• Heal paper cuts and immediately stop the pain with chapstick.
• If you accidentally write on your dry erase board with a permanent marker, scribble over it with a dry eraser marker to remove it.
• If your shoes smell, put them in the freezer overnight, it will kill the bacteria. 
• Make bug bites stop itching with a banana peel.
• Make a paper longer with 12-point text, but 14-point periods and commas.
• Need to get around a blocked website at work? Try replacing the http:// with https://
• Never send your resume as a word file (unless asked) Instead, print it to a pdf file, it’s much cleaner and professional looking.
• Pick a flavor of gum you don’t normally chew, and chew it while studying during a test.
• Place a piece of bread in a container with your homemade cookies and  they will stay soft.
• Put a dry towel into a dryer with wet clothes, they will dry faster.
• Put toothpaste on a pimple and it will dry out.
• Practise fake smiling in the mirror every day before going to work/school, you’ll genuinely start to feel happier.
• Rub canola/olive oil on knives before cutting onions, you won’t cry, alternatively chew gum and you won’t either.
• Short on time with a wrinkled dress shirt? Hang it up in the bathroom to steam it flat.
• The night before, place things you don’t want to forget the next morning on top of your shoes.
• Use hydrogen peroxide to remove blood stains from clothing.
• When cleaning windows use newspapers or coffee filters instead of paper towels, they will not leave streaks.
• When microwaving bread products/pizza put a glass of water in with it, it will keep your bread for going spongy.
• When you move into a new place you’re renting, take pictures of any and all damage, then post them on facebook (privately if preferred) so you can use the reference date as proof you didn’t do it.
• When searching plane tickets online delete your cookies prior, prices go up when you visit a site multiple times.

babbleslime:

Character development thing.

Plot points on this chart to represent how important these different aspects of a character’s life are to them. By doing that you can help determine what type of things your character deems to be most meaningful in their life, especially compared to others aspects.

A brief explanation of each aspect is below in case you’re confused about the meaning of any.

Physical Aspects

• Strength: to have physical power and strength
• Sex: to have sexual gratification and satisfaction
• Possessions: to have objects and tangible things
• Health: to have physical health and stability
• Appearance: to have a good external appearance

Emotional Aspects

• Love: to love and be loved, romantically or otherwise
• Appreciation: to be appreciated by others
• Attention: to be paid attention to
• Security: to feel secure emotionally
• Approval: to be approved by others

Social Aspects

• Respect: to be respected
• Friendship: to have friends
• Intimacy: to be intimate with a partner or partners
• Belongingness: to feel needed and belonged
• Family: to be on good terms with/have a family

Spiritual Aspects

• Inner peace: to be content with themselves
• Purpose: to feel as though they are fulfilling a purpose
• Self-sufficiency: to feel that they are able to provide for themselves
• Growth: to feel as though they are growing and changing
• Acceptance: to be able to accept themselves without consequence

(Source: dreatherobot)

kalidraws:

Today I gave my students a quick presentation on some of the basic considerations for composition, which I am now sharing with you! I’ve given them separate talks about color and tonal value/contrast, which are also super important compositional concerns. (I’ll be sharing those presentations too once I properly format them)

I personally love learning about different compositional techniques. It’s fun to think about the ways that the brain views & sorts images, and how we can trick it into feeling a certain way or looking at certain aspects of an image first! It’s easy to fall into compositional ruts (which I am also guilty of) because a lot of art gets by with mediocre, though serviceable, compositions. If you can generally understand what’s happening in an image then it’s generally fine. However, it’s the truly great compositions, where everything in the whole image has been considered and ‘clicks’ together, that bump up an illustration to a visual slam dunk. NC Wyeth is one of my favorite artists for this reason: his compositions are rock solid, varied based on the image’s intent, and always enhance the mood or action he is depicting.

For extra reading, some online compositional resources that I’ve found helpful or interesting include:
Creative Illustration by Andrew Loomis (download it for FREE. Such a great book all-around.)
Gurney Journey (check out the “Composition” tag, but really everything he posts is great)
The Schweitzer guide to spotting tangents
Cinemosaic (a blog by Lou Romano with some truly WONDERFUL compositions captured from various films)
Where to Put the Cow by Anita Griffin

Happy composition-ing!

joshtierney:

One of my favourite pieces by Roger Ebert is his “Great Movies” appreciation of Spirited Away (read it in full here). At the end of the piece he details an encounter he had with Hayao Miyazaki himself, where Miyazaki defines one of the key differences between the work of Studio Ghibli and mainstream American animation. I can see his words relating to comics as well, and these words are well-worth reading for any creative and parent.

Here is the excerpt from Ebert’s piece:

I was so fortunate to meet Miyazaki at the 2002 Toronto film festival. I told him I love the “gratuitous motion” in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or sigh, or gaze at a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.

“We have a word for that in Japanese,” he said. “It’s called ‘ma.’ Emptiness. It’s there intentionally.” He clapped his hands three or four times. “The time in between my clapping is ‘ma.’ If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness.”

I think that helps explain why Miyazaki’s films are more absorbing than the frantic action in a lot of American animation. “The people who make the movies are scared of silence” he said, “so they want to paper and plaster it over,” he said. “They’re worried that the audience will get bored. But just because it’s 80 percent intense all the time doesn’t mean the kids are going to bless you with their concentration. What really matters is the underlying emotions—that you never let go of those.

“What my friends and I have been trying to do since the 1970’s is to try and quiet things down a little bit; don’t just bombard them with noise and distraction. And to follow the path of children’s emotions and feelings as we make a film. If you stay true to joy and astonishment and empathy you don’t have to have violence and you don’t have to have action. They’ll follow you. This is our principle.”

He said he has been amused to see a lot of animation in live-action superhero movies. “In a way, live action is becoming part of that whole soup called animation. Animation has become a word that encompasses so much, and my animation is just a little tiny dot over in the corner. It’s plenty for me.”

It’s plenty for me, too.

bradofarrell:

I think all of those things are maybe less than 40% of what a person “is” and most of what a person is is how they relate to other people in conversation and how thoughtful they are and also like what they’re doing with their career and what their ambitions are and how they present themselves and how they think about other people and their relation to other people and their place in the world.

And I feel like nerd culture pretends that who you are is the media you consume and everything else about you doesn’t matter and people let their bodies and personalities and minds go to shit and they get this hivemind personality spoon fed to them from a fucking internet community and they let that control their life.

They let reddit turn them into a MRAs and they let tumblr turn them into an SJWs and they let big bang theory turn them into a faux geek. They let the most powerful media presence in their life decide the kind of personality they have and then that prevents them from adjusting their personality in a way that might make it fall outside of the template they’ve been given by the media they consume. I think that assuming the media you consume is your personality pre-empts any analysis or reflection on your own real life personality and how that affects your real life happiness and goals.

People watch High Fidelity and think it’s cool to be a jerk like Jack Black and then they do that and then no one likes them and then they’re sad that no one likes them but they don’t consider not being a jerk because they’re doing exactly what the movie said so they assume it’s everyone else’s fault and they become misanthropic.  Really any media or community or culture predicated on the idea that “everyone else is dumb and will never understand me” sort of has this built in pre-emptive defense against self-reflection and that’s really fucking disgusting.

(Source: the-humans-from-wall-e)

thespacegoat:

Courses:
Coursera
EDX
Udacity
University of Reddit

Books:
Bartleby
Gutenberg
Librivox
Poem Hunter

Videos:
Academic Earth
C. G. P. Grey
Crash Course
Khan Academy
Minute Physics
The New Boston Tutorials
TED
Unplug the TV

Documentaries:
Documentary Heaven
Top Documentary Films

Languages:
BBC Languages
Busuu
Dou Lingo
Live Mocha
MemRise
Verbling

Music:
How to Play Piano
Justin Guitar
Music Theory
Play Bass Now
Teoria

Programming:
Code Academy
Coding Bat
HTML Dog
Learn Code the Hard Way
Ruby Monk
Trypython

DIY/How-To:
Howcast
How Stuff Works
Instructables
The Daily Miscellany
Wiki How
Wonder How-To

Math:
Math Run
Project Euler
Wolfram Alpha

Cooking:
Cooking for Engineers
Cooklet
How2Heroes
Reluctant Gormet

(Source: thespacegoat)