I have a ko-fi page now!
Check my #kai draws tag to see what I’ve drawn ^-^
Some examples!
Sketches:
Bust drawing:
Full-body drawings:
I wish all the defenseless children of the world receive their Easter egg.
the decrease in costuming quality over the last 20 years has been soooo precipitous & nauseating. i’m not even talking abt marvel’s cg supersuits or anything this time, look at the fabric quality, structure, layering, character, and craftsmanship of older costumes in 102 dalmations (2000) vs cruella (2021)
ever after (1998) vs cinderella (2021)
lord of the rings (2001-2003) vs the rings of power (2022)
this trend should upset you not just because it looks cheap, but because it suggests a strong anti-art and anti-labor movement in film and tv making. don’t forget costumers are unionized
Ok, but what is happening here is not a degradation of skill. At all. The number of phenomenally talented and knowledgable Costumiers and maker working is astounding. The only thing more astounding is how little they are being properly utilised.
What is happening is a degradation of production schedules. Prep time is constantly being shrunk to the absolute bare minimum which limits design time, fitting time, r&d, sourcing (materials, hardware habdash, etc), making time (drafting, construction, embellishment, etc). Additionally budgets - despite the ridiculous sums of money being sunk - are becoming more shrunk, focused and scrutinised. That feeds back into the materials available (and a dependency on what IS available?, but also staffing levels - smaller workrooms, limited outsourcing etc etc. Schedules are not locked down at all. Ever. Even more so in these Covid times. Scripts aren’t locked down. Ever. Because productions never consider the wider logistics of outlying departments like costume, props etc.
Cast is increasingly last minute, w negotiations dragging out. This limits contact time for development and conception (actors must also be involved int he design process), fittings, etc. I did a job last year where - aside from our two leads - we had zero cast until the week we started shooting which meant we could only do extremely linited advance work plus we had a minuscule team despite being for a huge streaming platform with major stars. On another job we had three (3) days between a principle actor needing a visually iconic costume being cast and being ON CAMERA.
Additionally it is becoming increasingly common for actors to expect higher use of doubles - both stunt and picture doubles m. That means, simply, more costume as they all must have their own. Often in multiples. This with the commonality of stunts means that sometimes as much as 20+ repeats of element of a costume are needed, depending on necessity. That means fabrics are needed in huge quantities, and workrooms must effectively have factory productions. This paired with scheduling limitations above means more often than not we must use what we can get immediately. You know if you could have even a week to source something from, say, Italy, you can get something divine. But there just isn’t the time because you need 60m of specific fabric yesterday. There’s not time to get things made.
So the entire process is streamlined into what can be made in quantity and quickly. Everyone mourns what could be made if we only had the time, money and resources. Everyone know what we could be achieving, should be achieving and want to be achieving. But we just can’t because everything is about immediate, constantly shifting deadlines, high demands and logistics. It’s a nightmare, and we’re all very very tired. As with everything it’s all part of corporate greed. And I haven’t even gone into the twenty levels of executive meddling and the endless rounds of approvals (plus marketing and merchandising approvals etc etc etc it’s unending.)
I’ve been working in film costume for coming on 12 years (ugh), and it has gotten noticeably worse on all of these fronts in just the decade plus I’ve been around. Even in the last five years.
my proposal of a new trend for 2022 is that we need to bring back men wearing suits on a normal day and opening the doors for women and kissing women's hands
And slicking their jet black hair neatly
Thank you
Yea just
Classy men y’know
Hard truth that I’ve had to confront that I’m honestly not proud of:
Constantly voicing your abandonment issues lead to more people abandoning you.
I do not mean in Serious Conversations about what you need in a relationship or anything like that - I mean when your friend plays a video game with a different friend for a few days and you feel like your world is crumbling, that is not the time to talk about them.
I understand the fear that someone will decide they are done with you. I live that fear every single day, but here’s the rub.
If you tell people “you’ll probably leave me anyway” or similar things every time you feel that fear, people will leave you.
Not because they don’t want to be your friend, your partner, your roommate, whatever. Not because you aren’t deserving of friends (you are), but because it is exhausting to be constantly told by someone you like/love to go away.
Because that is how it feels on the other end. I don’t say this to make it worse, or to make you feel like you’re at fault. Your brain is hurting you, and it’s okay to feel things. But if you find that it’s hard to keep people around you, then you need to hear that outside of things like conversations about boundaries and triggers and such, it would be to your benefit to change your language.
Instead of telling people “you probably don’t like me”, try asking. “You like me? It’s much easier for them to reassure you when you don’t start with a negative, because it puts your brain in a different mindset, one that finds it easier to believe their response.
Sit with your issues. Parent them. And when they’re done screaming, hold their little hands and dry their little faces and try to remember that you are worth being loved. I won’t say it’s easy, because it’s really fucking not. I won’t say you’ll get it the first time, or that you’ll never fuck up. I still do. But you deserve friends and partners and love, it’s just that so do they.
Another thing about this is that you are waving a red flag.
Because here's the thing.
When your friend plays a video game with a different friend for a few days, and you talk about how that hurt you? You've just created a situation where you've placed the onus of your emotions on your friend, who did nothing wrong. Now your friend has to worry about what other perfectly reasonable activities are going to get them accused of hurting you, which is what you were doing whether you meant to or not.
And here's the other thing.
When you tell someone "everyone always leaves me", they wonder why. And it's very possible that they've dealt with someone who complained about this, then proceeded to demonstrate why. There is a particular kind of social parasite that will completely use up their friend group, then move on to new friends while shit-talking how they were treated by the last friend group.
I know someone who once briefly got into this habit of saying stuff like “Oh, you don’t really like me. You’re just being nice” or “You should’ve cut me off a long time ago” or sometimes vaguely suggesting (in the middle of us having a nice, positive interaction) that I would abandon them if given the opportunity.
Frankly, it was exhausting. And I didn’t like being told that I would inevitably leave them, especially when I had no intention of doing so. It made me feel like I was a terrible friend, even when I hadn’t done anything wrong.
I explained to them that it wasn’t healthy for either of us for them to talk that way, and that they’d just have to trust me. If they didn’t, they’d let this doubt just creep in, and if left unchecked it would destroy the relationship.
Of course I’m still friends with this person now. I love them to death. They also have changed their view on me and learned to trust that I’m with them for better or worse. They still don’t always value themselves as much as I think they should at times, but our relationship has become so much stronger since I’ve been learning how to more clearly show how much I care about them, and they’ve been able to actually look and see that I have no intention of leaving them.
a really little animated black cat with giant eyes and no other discernible features
do you get it or do you not know anything
more examples that people keep getting upset with me for not adding
KITBULL
For people with anxiety about filing taxes, here’s what things that happen when you make a mistake on your tax return:
- it gets corrected
- you get a letter in the mail either asking for some additional information or a letter showing the adjustment
- you pay the amount (there’s options for payment plans too!) or get a refund
Things that do not happen
- you’re “in trouble”
- you are charged with fraud
- you go to jail
I know that most people are probably just joking/exaggerating when they say a mistake on their return means they get thrown in jail but when I worked with the public I always would encounter people who believed that would happen and they would be panicking about it. So I like to put this out there every year because if I can even prevent one person from feeling that way, it’s worth it
Annual reblog of this important information.
The thingy above where you sign your tax form says that you’ve filled it out to the best of your ability. “Sir, I am a dumbass” is 100% a valid defense
Things Tumblr needs: unlimited asks, +500kb gif size, more photosets layouts, chance to tag hyphens, chance to USE hyphens in urls without tricks, replies notifications, instant messaging, option to know when someone’s online
Things Karp gives us: fanmail
this post from early 2012 is a remarkable artifact, since almost all these features have since been introduced, and even people who were here for it barely remember fanmail
libbleslie