Being In A Public Restroom And Hearing Someone Shitting Really Loud

Inspired @connorsquarter ‘s post

I am VERY attracted to andy samberg, period [emphatic period]

i am VERY attracted to andy samberg dancing in a denim jacket

"Growing Around Grief"

Lois Tonkin, 1996

there’s a blood feud going on at The Atlantic over which planet is best

You can follow the Not Famous But Lovely Songs here!

La-HA! hit me like a fucking drug.

How TV Cartoons Are Made - A (Mostly) Simplified Guide

When I was in school and wanted to work in animation, there was very little information about how cartoons are actually made. Even my professors at college knew very little about the industry as it is today. I’m sure it would’ve been better to study somewhere in California (like CalArts) to be better informed about this stuff, but I didn’t have that opportunity.

Nowadays, many kids in school have a dream career that they don’t really know much about. There’s a lot of missing bits of information and a lot of straight up lies that get circulated as fact as people try to scramble to put the pieces together on how cartoons for television are actually made.

I’ve been storyboarding for television for a while now, and there still aren’t clear resources for those wanting to get into the industry. I wanted to make the basics available to everyone, so here’s a quick rundown through the TV pipeline. Please note: all studios and productions are different. Even cartoons made within the same studio could have wildly different production guidelines. This is not a concrete explanation of how every cartoon is made; this is simply a generalized look at the “typical” television pipeline.

**DISCLAIMER** All images in this post have been sourced from blogs, twitters, scribd and flickr pages are publicly available, and no internal studio materials have been used that have not been already published publicly online. This post is influenced heavily by my own individual experience, as well as friends’. 

With that said, this might be a lengthy read, so let’s go!

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He even made Emma Watson beatbox. No one escapes this man.

Well you know what my rule is, I make the reporter beatbox.

Here’s the thing about the air nomads.

I introduced a friend to ATLA a few nights ago, and they had only known two things about the entire show: the cabbage meme, and that Aang apparently wants to ride every large and dangerous animal he can possibly find. We got through the first five or so episodes, and my friend noted that Aang is exactly what a 12-year-old would be like if given godlike powers, and that this is literally just what he could do with airbending. He can’t even wield any of the other elements, and he’s one of the most powerful people on the planet, because he’s an airbender.

And that got me thinking.

This snippet from Bitter Work is one of the few pieces of concrete information we get about the airbenders, at least in ATLA. Iroh is explaining to Zuko how all four of the elements connect to the world and to each other.

Fire is the element of power, of desire and will, of ambition and the ability to see it through. Power is crucial to the world; without it, there’s no drive, no momentum, no push. But fire can easily grow out of control and become dangerous; it can become unpredictable, unless it is nurtured and watched and structured.

Earth is the element of substance, persistence, and enduring. Earth is strong, consistent, and blunt. It can construct things with a sense of permanence; a house, a town, a walled city. But earth is also stubborn; it’s liable to get stuck, dig in, and stay put even when it’s best to move on.

Water is the element of change, of adaptation, of movement. Water is incredibly powerful both as a liquid and a solid; it will flow and redirect. But it also will change, even when you don’t want it to; ice will melt, liquid will evaporate. A life dedicated to change necessarily involves constant movement, never putting down roots, never letting yourself become too comfortable.

We see only a few flashbacks to Aang’s life in the temples, and we get a sense of who he was and what kind of upbringing he had.

This is a preteen with the power to fucking fly. He’s got no fear of falling, and a much reduced fear of death. There’s a reason why the sages avoid telling the new avatar their status until they turn sixteen; could you imagine a firebender, at twelve years old, learning that they were going to be the most powerful person in the whole world? Depending on that child, that could go so badly.

But the thing about Aang, and the thing about the Air Nomads, is that they were part of the world too. They contributed to the balance, and then they were all but wiped out by Sozin. What was lost, there? Was it freedom? Yes, but I think there’s something else too, and it’s just yet another piece of the utter brilliance of the worldbuilding of ATLA.

To recap: we have power to push us forward; we have stability to keep us strong; we have change to keep us moving.

And then we have this guy.

The air nomads brought fun to the world. They brought a very literal sense of lightheartedness.

Sozin saw this as a weakness. I think a lot of the world did, in ATLA. Why do the Air Nomads bother, right? They’re just up there in their temples, playing games, baking pies in order to throw them as a gag. As Iroh said above, they had pretty great senses of humour, and they didn’t take themselves too seriously.

But that’s a huge part of having a world of balance and peace.

It’s not just about power, or might, or the ability to adapt. You can have all of those, but you also need fun. You need the ability to be vulnerable, to have no ambitions beyond just having a good day. You need to be able to embrace silliness, to nurture play, to have that space where a very specific kind of emotional growth can occur. Fun makes a hard life a little easier. Fun makes your own mortality a little less frightening to grasp. Fun is the spaces in between, that can’t be measured by money or military might. Fun is what nurtures imagination, allows you to see a situation in a whole new light, to find new solutions to problems previously considered impossible.

Fun is what makes a stranger into a friend, rather than an enemy.

Fun helps you see past your differences.

Fun is what fuels curiosity and openmindedness.

Fun is the first thing to die in a war.