Favorite First Time Film Watches Of 2021 (in No Particular Order):

Shopping for laptops fucking sucks ‘cause I don’t know shit about computers. I’ve never had a computer with a functional webcam or microphone or the ability to play computer games made later than 2005 or a speaker that could play anything loud enough to hear from more than a foot away. How the hell should I know what I want?!

hey. don’t cry. crush two cloves of garlic into a pot with a dollop of olive oil and stir until golden then add one can of crushed tomatoes a bit of balsamic vinegar half a tablespoon of brown sugar half a cup of grated parmesan cheese and stir for a few minutes adding a handful of fresh spinach until wilted and mix in pasta of your choice ok?

I bought a book with extremely modern and relatable translations of Sanskrit poetry from 2,000 years ago

Maybe Another Life is a bizarre gravity-bending industrial horror game with a touch of reincarnation.

Read More & Play The Full Game, Free (Windows)

Red Trees is a very sweet horror story where you search for a monster that’s terrifying a little town.

Read More & Play The Full Game, Free (Windows)

How do you go about getting such high quality scans of your art?

ok bear with me cuz this is going to be a lengthy post since I see a lot of people struggle with this and I think I could help by detailing my process.

before anything else I have to remark, this whole process only works with paper, loose canvas and any other media that can at least bend and warp a little in order to properly fit into a flatbed scanner, if you're working on on hard/non-maleable surfaces like wood pannel or mounted canvas, I recommend these tutorials:

Now, the first step is the most crucial: USE A GOOD QUALITY SCANNER! a scanner that's capable of obtaining photographic quality images is crucial, as there's no amount of editing that can salvage an image that has been overexposed, burnt, and artifacted to hell and back, here's an example: on the left, a scan of one of my paintings taken on the scanner of a cheap all-in-one printer. on the right, the same painting, scanned on a dedicated HP Scanjet G4050 flatbed scanner, which is the scanner that I still use to this day.

The difference might seem minimal at first, but when you start getting up close, the differences become REALLY apparent, not only are the colors washed out and muddy on the all-in-one scanner; there's some heavy artifacting on its scan as well as random blurry spots that makes the image look much worse, and the overexposure has completely killed the paper grain which is much more visible on the flatbed scan.

it's worth pointing out that both images you see here are what they looked like /AFTER/ adjustments and corrections in photoshop; the first one, as bad as it looks, took me several hours to of tweaking to get to that point, while the latter took me about 10 minutes of saturation adjustments to make it look as close as possible to the original painting. the reasons for this stark difference in quality are very simple: all-in-one printer-scanners ARE NOT made for scanning art, they're made for scanning documents, so the quality needed for that is much lower than the one needed for a painting or a photograph, so what you need instead is a dedicated, photographic quality flatbed scanner. One that I could recommend, not from personal experience but from recommendation from my peers, is the Epson Perfection V550/V600 Photo Scanner, BUT I don't want you to think from this that you NEED to shell out the big bucks into the most expensive and latest equipment in order to be able to get decent scans of your art, the previously mentioned scanner that I used is a lower-mid range device and is almost 10 years old, so if you ask me, it is perfectly acceptable to buy a pre-owned, used, refurbished photo scanner, as long as it's in decent shape and works as intended, you will be able to get what you need out of it. (***EDIT*** Another tumblr user with experience in professional media scanning has pointed out that while these scanner models are great and very advanced, they are very expensive and most of that pricetag is related to photographic scanning features that are not useful for anything that isn't photo negatives or digitizing of documents, their suggested model instead is the Epson Perfection V19, because "it's running the same photo scanning firmware as the higher-end models, has the same bit depth and still scans up to 4800 dpi. They run ~$70 brand new, even cheaper if you find them on sale or used.") Ok, I have the scanner, what now? the first and most important thing to consider when you're going to scan your work is: SCAN AT THE HIGHEST POSSIBLE QUALITY THAT YOUR COMPUTER CAN HANDLE, most if not all scanners give you the option to select the dpi (dots per inch) measurements at which you want to scan. the standard for "decent" quality images is 300 dpi, but I personally find that extremely insufficient, yes, it will give you decent-ish images to post on social media, but if you want to do anything else with your images, like making high quality prints, posters, or high quality closeups of your work, those 300 dpi are going to fall really short and become extremely limiting. personally, I scan ALL my work at 1200 dpi, I could go higher than that all the way to 2400 but honestly, I've yet to find a use for an image size that big, at 1200 you already have enough quality to print a house-sized poster with a pretty decent looking final product, so unless you plan on hanging copies of your work to the side of the Empire State building or if you're trying to scan EXTREMELY small pieces, 1200 dpi should be enough, the file sized you're going to get out of 1200 are already almost ridiculous (yes, this image is over 1 GB in size)

Next, to address the elephant in the room: What do I do if my painting is bigger than the flatbed of the scanner? well, you're gonna have to learn to scan in parts like I do! the trick to scanning in parts is that every section you scan needs to cover a little more area than it should so that when you start stitching the individual scans together in your preferred image editing software, you can erase the sections warped by the edges of the scanner bed and cover them over with the extra area scanned in the other images, for example, here's a little chart I made on how I scan a medium sized painting in 4 parts:

make sure to NOT rotate the painting while scanning it, simply slide it across the bed to match your desired section, always with the top, bottom, left, and right pointing always to the same directions, if you start rotating the painting you run the risk of warping the whole scan, or warp it in less predictable ways, and it's gonna be a bit of a nightmare to stitch together. I also recommend to instead of closing the top of the scanner to make it flat against the scanner bed, keep it open and put a few books on top of the painting that are a 1 or 2 cm smaller than the scanner bed, the reason to do this is because closing the scanner cover and letting that flatten the painting, the fit between the top and the bed is so tight that you risk bending and damaging the paper/canvas when scanning, giving it some space at the edges when scanning lets the paper/canvas curl naturally with the material's own flexibility, so the risk of damage is much lower. if your painting is bigger than that, you will essentially follow the exact same process but just divide the painting into more scans, personally I've done up to 9 scans per a single painting on my biggest pieces, any more than that can get a little toooo complicated to stitch together, but not necessarily impossible, especially considering that a lot of image editing softwares nowadays have automated stitching functions, which CAN get over the edge warping on their own, but I've personally found that you'll still get better results if you can eliminate that warping and let the AI work with the best sections of the scans only. PERSONALLY I don't use the automated functions and prefer to do it completely by hand in Photoshop because I'm a neurotic perfectionist and I tend to zoom in into the paintings and notice every little microscopic smudging and bad overlap the AI does between the scans that 99% of people won't notice, but hey, that's just me, absolutely feel free to use the automated functions that the software gives, you don't need to be as extra as me! I think that about covers most of my process there, remember this is a process that might take a little practice so don't give up if your first scans don't look that great or look wonky when stitched together, you have plenty of room to finetune and adjust everything to your liking. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask and I'll try my best to answer. Also if you found this small tutorial useful, maybe drop me a tip or checkout my patreon and store to support me ;) ***edit*** noticed someone added a flashing imagery CW so I modified the gif so that it blinks slowly and it's hopefully less hard on the eyes!

Ppl: “Glaze and nightshade all your art!!”

Also ppl: * does not mention that you need to have a fucking NVIDIA GPU and running nightshade on one image takes at best 20 minutes*

Like the online version of glaze/nightshade requires an account. And last time i checked they arent accepting new accounts because of the high pressure.

Like i make my art on my ipad. My MacBook is from 2014. If i tried to download and run nightshade on my decade old macbook and go throufg 10+ years of artworks i might as well just set it on fire.

rat patootie (bless my soul)

Yes, like in the movie Ratatouille, the recipe so good it makes the evil food critic cry tears of joy. 

I swear this stuff has magical properties but ANYWAY. I’m not about to be that person with the 8 paragraph personal essay before the recipe so here it is

4-6 cloves garlic 1 onion olive oil 1 28oz can crushed or petite diced tomatoes fresh basil and parsley. Like 1/3 of a cup each? 1 eggplant 1-2 zucchini 1-2 yellow squash 5-6 roma tomatoes salt and pepper

1. Get food. Tricky part: make sure the eggplant, zucchini, squash and tomatoes are all roughly the same thiccness.

I finally figured it out: for a 10″ cast iron pan, you want 8-10″ apiece of each kind of tube veggie.

2. chop veggies. This is a fun recipe to make if you like to stab things a lot. Slice the tube veggies as thinly as you can. I can reliably do about 1/8th inch.

3. Preheat oven to 350 and put your pan over medium heat. If you have dried herbes de provence, throw 1-2 tablespoons in the pan and let them toast until you can smell them. If not don’t worry about it.

I put in extra lavender just ‘cause I could.

4. Add 1-2 tablespoons olive oil and plenty of garlic. Never let some catfish tell you how much garlic is too much. Feel it in your heart.

Anyway let that saute for about 2 minutes.

5. Add onions and saute until translucent, about 8 minutes. 

6. Add the crushed tomatoes, half the parsley and basil, 1-2 tsp black pepper and a pinch of salt. Let that simmer for, I don’t know, 5-10 minutes?

7. While that’s happening, mix like ¼ cup of olive oil with another teaspoon of garlic, black pepper, salt, and the rest of the parsley and basil. Set that aside.

8. Turn off the stove burner and start putting the veggies in the pan. Don’t know if it matters but I usually alternate soft with hard, so I do eggplant-zucchini-tomato-yellow squash. 

Keep doing that

I usually do a ring of veggies around the outside of the pan and then fill in the center however works. Most versions of this recipe lay the veggies down on top of the sauce. I’ve always stuck them straight up and down in the pan. Is this better? Who knows, man.

Ratatouille ready to go in the oven

9. Bake for about an hour and 15 minutes. It’s done when the zucchini and squash in the center are fork tender.

10. Spoon the olive oil/herb/garlic sauce over the top while it’s bubbling hot

Ways to stretch it out: Ratatouille is awesome on top of pasta. I usually get 4 meals out of one pan like this. Also, you will have leftover tube veg. I buy frozen pizza crusts and throw the veggies on top with some pizza sauce or olive oil, seasonings, and some goat cheese crumbles or mozzarella.

Anyway, that’s my current “happy place” recipe. It’s never cost me more than $10 in raw materials to make (including fresh herbs and bourgie canned tomatoes!) and is always a crowd-pleaser.

Nom on that

an angel on letterboxd just dropped a whole playlist of films free on youtube I was filled with so much love and light I had to share with you guys

how to find literally any post on a blog in seconds (on desktop)

there are so many posts about ~tumblr is so broken, you can’t find any post on your own blog, it’s impossible, bluhrblub~

I am here to tell you otherwise! it is in fact INCREDIBLY easy to find a post on a blog if you’re on desktop/browser and you know what you’re doing:

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant. every single post, every single time. in chronological order starting with the most recent post. note: it will not find #croissants or that time you made the typo #croidnssants. for a tag with multiple words, it’s just /tagged/my-croissant and it will show you everything with the exact phrase #my croissant

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant/chrono will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the exact phrase #croissant, but it will show them in reverse order with the oldest first 

url.tumblr.com/search/croissant isn’t as perfect at finding everything, but it’s generally loads better than the search on mobile. it will find a good array of posts that have the word croissant in them somewhere. could be in the body of the post (op captioned it “look at my croissant”) or in the tags (#man I want a croissant). it won’t necessarily find EVERYTHING like /tagged/ does, but I find it’s still more reliable than search on mobile. you can sometimes even find posts by a specific user by searching their url. also, unlike whatever random assortment tumblr mobile pulls up, it will still show them in a more logically chronological order

url.tumblr.com/day/2020/11/05 will show you every post on the blog from november 5th, 2020, in case you’re taking a break from croissants to look for destiel election memes 

url.tumblr.com/archive/ is search paradise. easily go to a particular month and see all posts as thumbnails! search by post type! search by tags but as thumbnails now

url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio will show you every audio post on your blog (you can also filter by other post types). sometimes a little imperfect if you’re looking for a video when the op embedded the video in a text post instead of posting as a video post, etc

url.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/croissant will show you EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant, but it will show you them in the archive thumbnail view divided by months. very useful if you’re looking for a specific picture of a croissant that was reblogged 6 months ago and want to be able to scan for it quickly 

url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio/tagged/croissant will show you every audio post tagged with the specific phrase #croissant (you can also filter by photo or text instead, because I don’t know why you have audio posts tagged croissant) 

the tag system on desktop tumblr is GENUINELY amazing for searching within a specific blog! 

caveat: this assumes a person HAS a desktop theme (or “custom theme”) enabled. a “custom theme” is url.tumblr.com, as opposed to tumblr.com/url. I’ve heard you have to opt-into the former now, when it used to be the default, so not everyone HAS a custom theme where you can use all those neat url tricks. 

if the person doesn’t have a “custom theme” enabled, you’re beholden to the search bar. still, I’ve found the search bar on tumblr.com/url is WAY more reliable than search on mobile. for starters, it tends to bring posts up in a sensible order, instead of dredging up random posts from 2013 before anything else

if you’re on mobile, I’m sorry. godspeed and good luck finding anything. (my one tip is that if you’re able to click ON a tag rather than go through the search bar, you’ll have better luck. if your mutual has recently reblogged a post tagged #croissant, you can click #croissant and it’ll bring up everything tagged #croissant just like /tagged/croissant. but if there’s no readily available tag to click on, you have to rely on the mobile search bar and its weird bizarre whims)