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oh no, it's TBSkyen
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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

PINNED POST, FAQ, INFORMATION

Hi, I’m TBSkyen. I make videos on YouTube sometimes. This is my main tumblr blog, the “brand” blog as it were, where I maintain my Social Media Presence™ on this site.

I use the ironic ™ to signal my personal discomfort with the work of being a minor media personality even while I still do that work and make a living off it.

I have a sideblog called @tbposting, mostly for shitposts and reblogs, and in my opinion I have pretty darn good taste in reblogs, so you can follow that if you want. It’s also where I’ll do random personal posting, microblogging, etc.

This main blog is primarily for 1) answering asks, and 2) posting my Original Content™, usually my main channel videos, as well as the occasional longer essay or critique. Sometimes I’ll reblog an interesting or useful thing, or boost a friend’s work, but I try to keep the spam to a minimum.

—

About Me

I am a thirtysomething content creator whose primary expertise is character design.

I have a bachelor’s degree in English, never finished my master’s, did most of a bachelor’s degree in history, and that’s it. These are my academic qualifications, no more and no less.

My professional experience is primarily being a freelancer and self-employed creator. I spent the better part of a decade working as a commission artist, running webcomics, drawing fanart, and the occasional animation work and not safe for work commissions, and I have at this point a decade of experience and self-study in the subjects I cover. I have also done online community management for, god help me, almost twenty years, so that’s a part of my skillset I’ll never escape.

I do not have any particular professional creative industry experience, although given what I hear from my professional friends, sometimes that seems like a blessing.

Please maintain a critical distance when engaging with my work. I am a critic. My work is very rarely meant to be taken as authoritative or didactic, and when it is, I will make it clear in my writing. Just because I speak with confidence doesn’t mean I am trying to assert objective truth.

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TAGS (to follow, or filter)

  • #tbanswers is the tag for every single ask I answer on this blog
  • #tb reblog is the tag for reblogs
  • #tb essay is for the occasional longer essay or critical writing
  • #tbvideos is for my videos and Content™
  • #tb recommends is for the occasional recommendation of a video essay or other creator

Yes, I know the spaces are inconsistent. It’s not on purpose, I just typed them in haphazardly when I started using them and it’s stuck.

—

FAQ (before you ask)

Q: Will you ever do a video about ____ ?
A: The answer to this question is almost universally “maybe someday, if I have time, and if I feel I have anything worthwhile to say.” And the more realistic answer is “no, because I already have far too much on my plate and I have burned myself out too many times.” In general, please don’t ask me this question, I will most likely not answer it because I have given the same answer a thousand times, but I still feel guilty about not answering them.

Q: Will you continue your series of videos about ____ ?
A: Yes! I will continue the let’s plays I started, I will finish the Boss Designs series, I will do another What’s the Deal With, I will do more shorts about the subjects I’ve got going on. The main obstacle is, again, my tendency to overload myself.

Q: Do you have a PO box? Can I send you something?
A: Not yet, but I’m looking into it. It may be a while before I get it set up.

Q: Do you have merchandise?
A: A little bit, yes, at tbskyen.redbubble.com.

Q: What’s your opinion on [game/movie/comic/book/etc]?
A: I struggle to answer very open, broad questions like this. Most things I have opinions about, I have multiple opinions, and different ones depending on the perspective and specific element in question. I’m much more likely to answer specific, bounded questions.

Q: Can I send you fanart?
A: PLEASE. Askbox, tag me on bluesky, send it to my email! I love seeing every piece of it!

Q: Why do you never appear on camera?
A: A forest witch cursed me to look not quite but ALMOST like Paul Giamatti in all photos and videos ever taken of me, and his laywers sent me a cease-and-desist.

Q: Are you gay/straight/bi/other?
A: The decision I’ve made for myself, at least for this period of my life, is that privacy is precious, and once given up can never be reclaimed on the internet. I am open about being aromantic (not asexual), because it’s a sometimes invisible and underdiscussed identity, and I know it would have helped me a lot to see someone speak about it when I was younger.

The rest of it is for me to know, and for you to speculate about, although preferably somewhere I can’t see it. I accept that this is a part of being a Personality, but it still feels weird, y'know?

Q: Is it weird if I find your voice kinda hot?
A: I’ve put a lot of work into developing this voice and making it nice to listen to, so that’s not weird at all and I find it quite complimentary, thank you.

I generally don’t mind people doing flirty/thirsty posting about or at me, just so long as we all understand that 1) you should never give a stranger like me information which could be used to harm you. Nicer-seeming YouTubers than me have turned out to be monsters.

And 2) it will never go beyond playful online flirtiness. I like to fluster my live chat, I’ll flirt back in an ask or a post maybe, but I am not flirting with you, or inviting any kind of closer intimacy with you, the person I responded to.

Think of me like a comedian doing crowd-work at a show - you can chat to me in the bar after the show, but when I asked you what you do for work I wasn’t looking for a personal connection, I was doing my work as an entertainer. Please no sending me nudes, or propositions, or confession letters in my email inbox. We are strangers, and I am always performing a persona in public.

Pinned Post tbskyen tb skyen

averagefungus asked:

so this is weirder than the asks I assume you normally get, but since she has (or at least her most recent incarnation) been inescapable for the past week, what are your thoughts on the Hex Maniac pokemon trainer from X and Y? And what is it about her design that people so riled up?

I’ve not taken a close look at her, but the vibe I get is that people are reacting so strongly to her more because she is a Hex Maniac than because of the actual features of her design.

Like, the vibe is that it is more excitement that a favourite character has a new outfit and design, and excitement to play with those features, than it is a strong reaction to the quality of the design itself.

Which is not a knock on the design, mind you, I just think it’s more that Hex Maniac has a lot of fans who are excited for the character.

tb answers averagefungus pokemon hex maniac pokémon
scaviogifs
scaviogifs

Good news, everyone!

I've been working through a lot of blender python to see how much of the process I can start automating! After days of work, I was able to have this Lilligant be imported, setup, rendered, and cropped/resized to <10MB in one click:

image

But there's still manual work that's gotta be done, as poor Pignite and Samurott can attest to:

image
image

Still, the good news is that the steps needed to make these gifs has been significantly reduced, so you may see more frequent posting in the near future! :>

ohnoitstbskyen

You should follow this blog if you like seeing nice gifs of Pokémon doing things

tb reblog tb recommends pokemon Pokémon

mirroredpanopticon asked:

new to this site and not a question but I had a dream that you made a video called 'Why art isn't forever and why it will be eternal'.

in it you talked at length about art history, the ephemerality of art objects and the unceasing human need to create. can't recall the details but it was deeply moving. just woke up when the rant about capitalism was about to start.

idk why but i needed to share this

That does sound a lot like something I would do. If you have the dream again, try and write down the script so I can plagiarise me

tb answers

vodenkonj asked:

Seeing that Luke post get thousands upon thousands notes is giving me hives. How does one become this fandom brained? I know the jokes are "don't mess with fans of X they don't even watch/read/listen to their own film/show/etc." and any fandom is going to cause some amount of ooc behaviour for the sake of jokes and memes and stuff, but surely at some point the character is so bent out of shape you stop to ponder what you're doing.

Who is this Luke Skywalker, collector of wayward orphans? Why would he want to be Reys dad? You get the feeling she might want it at the start of TLJ... And then the rest of the movie happens, going into great detail, at times in overly didactic ways, as to why that's a Bad Idea for her personal growth and the galaxy at large.

Even in older Legends material, where he ends up having actual kids, most of the lauded and beloved portrayals of his character are things like the original Thrawn trilogy, and in that he spends all three books struggling with if there's any place for him in the galaxy after the emperor died. The supposed definitive alternate sequel trilogy is, at least for Luke, largely about if he even should restart the jedi order, since his own training is incomplete and he has a deep fear any students he has are going to eventually succumb to the dark side, and how if they do it'll probably be a direct result of his incompetence. He does naturally, much like in TLJ, overcome these feelings of inadequacy and re-emerge as the definitive hero of the story, but spending a few years wallowing is just a very Luke way to deal with problems in life.

Like yeah I wonder why a bitter, self-isolating old man who views his life as a colossal failure wouldn't be jumping for joy when a younger, more naive version of himself shows up to his house uninvited.

For how desperate to venerate the Nostalgia the sequel trilogy project as a whole is, only TLJ really feels like it actually gives a shit about the story it's supposedly continuing. I didn't think you could look at Lukes death and not feel the overwhelming love and care for him specifically. I always shed a tear when binary sunset kicks in and I'm not even that into the originals. I was a prequel defender in 2010, Luke is the 20th character I think about when people mention SW.

Do people just not engage with the source material at all? Is this a product of the whole fandom tourism boom in the last 5-ish years? I genuinely don't want to be mean. After all, fandom is all of us playing with our toys, and you should always try to avoid a "old man yells at cloud" scenario, but like... It's a movie for 12 year olds that's very deliberately laying out all the cards. A slightly more nuanced and emotionally mature movie for 12 year olds than you might expect but... A child could get it, it's been focus grouped to hell and back so any given child on the planet should get it... How are you as an adult asking why the story had conflict?

I also broke out in hives a little bit when I found out that my addition (?) had made that thing go around. Or maybe it wasn’t my addition, I’m actually not sure, but I worry that it was. The OP turned off reblogs, and I can only assume it was because people starting doing absurd bullshit discourse on the post which… hhhh I don’t really like being part of inflicting that on anyone over something as unimportant as Star Wars opinions.

Also, the thing I was reacting against really wasn’t the fact that people have headcanons about who and what kind of character Luke is - like, that’s just normal and generally a good and fun part of fandom. I reacted against the idea of The Last Jedi being thoughtless about his character. It interprets Luke in a very specific way, but that interpretation is, I think objectively, deeply grounded in the history of his character and the thematic throughlines of the Skywalker-focused movies. So it annoyed me a bit to see people treat the depiction like it was some kind of failure to engage with the original material. I think that’s not quite fair to what the movie was, and I think it leads to weak criticism of its flaws.

I think that the better angle for critique of the whole sequel trilogy and Rian Johnson’s contribution is that obsesses far too much about the original trilogy, and is at its best in those few scant moments when it breaks away from it. If the sequel trilogy hadn’t had the corporate mandate to be a kind of Frankenstein remake of the OT, perhaps a kindly old grandfatherly Luke could have been a fun and interesting interpretation of the character’s future. Luke is what he is in TLJ because the trilogy absolutely fucking had to recreate the narrative beats of Dagobah, and therefore absolutely had to have Luke learn another lesson from Yoda about learning to let go of his attachments to and fears about the future and be present in the here-and-now.

Johnson is clearly a fucking nerd-ass Star Wars nerd, whose greatest mistake was assuming that other Star Wars nerds would engage with the material with good faith and an eye towards appreciation and discovery, rather than product-brained, screaming entitlement to their supremacy-affirming nostalgia security blanket.

To be clear, here I am talking about the culture war grifter assholes who poison the world, and not fandom people who have a cozy headcanon about Luke as a cheerful old community dad. I don’t think it’s fandom tourism to have a headcanon about a character, or a favored interpretation of them, even one which feels somewhat divorced from the original source-text. If I had to take a guess, the people on the original post developed that headcanon through fandom - by way of fanfics and fanposting and fanart, by way of fix-it fics and excited speculation. If I had to take a guess, they got their headcanon about Luke the same place everyone gets their headcanons about popular characters: from some combination of appreciation, projection, and a desire to see the thing you love tell a story that you need to hear. That’s just human, and I don’t think you can spend any significant amount of time in fandom without developing those attachments to certain stories or characters.

tb answers vodenkonj star wars luke skywalker the last jedi

strigiformelover asked:

What are your thoughts on the argument that the ending of Arcane was NOT intended to be a happy one? Like, the idea is that the show is a tragedy, and we're MEANT to feel upset that nothing changed between the Twin Cities and that Zaun didn't get its independence. (I can see the argument-especially since the show places so much emphasis on the Cycle of Violence and how difficult it is to break-but I also get why people might not like that take. Your thoughts?)

To borrow a phrase from a better critic: framing and aesthetic supercedes the rest of the text, always, always, always.

The ending is framed as a moment of hopeful progress brought about by the unifying pressure of an outside threat. It’s bright, it’s airy, it’s a liiiiittle tense but it is framed in the visual language as a clear positive, a mark of progress, an olive branch and a moment of change. It is framed in positive visual aesthetics.

If it was meant to be tragic, they failed to present it that way, giving preference to attempting to create a feeling of resolution. This is exemplified most clearly with the bookend of the airship that opens the series, and which Powder says “one day I will ride one of those.” In the very final shot that same ship sails out into the blue, beautiful sky absent of storm clouds, implying that that is how Jinx “walks away,” thus resolving her arc (please don’t get me started on how I feel about Ghost Silco’s “I was so wrong to be resentful of my oppressor, the smart move is just to leave my community and fuck off for my own peace of mind” speech.)

arcane tb answers league of legends piltover zaun silco jinx
ranseur
mandalors

me remembering that luke and rey didn’t even have a good relationship and we didn’t get to see them as a parental relationship or even as friends

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artoodeetoa

cant believe they expected us to believe luke saw rey; a lonely kid from a desert planet dreaming about finding her parents, struggling with her identity, and dealing with the weight and pressure of bringing back the jedi…. and he didnt want to help her. not only that, they also made them argue the whole time. SICK

mandalors

the real luke skywalker would meet rey and be like oh i know you. i’m your dad now. i can teach you three things: how to Force, how to make the perfect cup of hot chocolate, and how to destroy fascists. let’s go do barrel-rolls in x-wings

softieskywalker

the way the real luke skywalker would have taken a single glance at that feral desert girl and been like. “my child now.” come here girl I’ll teach you how to build moisture vaporators so you never have to exploit yourself for water. yes this is more important than jedi training. yes we can cover that later. oh you want to fight kyle? oh you’re struggling with the idea that he might still have a soul? ok learn from my mistakes and don’t lose a hand in a fight you can’t win, but also did i tell you about the time i beat my dad’s ass so hard he bounced back to the light side? funny story actually,

all of this in the 10 minutes after she gives him anakin’s lightsaber

mandalors

Rey: i was abandoned by my family on a backwater desert planet and waited for them for most of my life before a droid and the man who would become my best friend showed up and i chose to leave everything i knew behind in order to help save them and help the rebellion. i am very strong with the force and want to learn in order to protect the ones i love but my own capacity for darkness scares me. i need help understanding who i am and what my power means

Luke:

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softieskywalker

the force: here, have an apprentice who’s a metaphorical narrative mirror for you. she needs guidance and a mentor figure.

luke: oh you mean my new daughter

the force: what

mandalors

Rey: here dad meet my friends

Luke, meeting orphan mechanic rebel rose tico, pilot with a flair for drama poe dameron, and man who chose goodness in the face of overwhelming evil and is powerful in the force finn: oh you mean all my new kids

softieskywalker

luke, talking to the force ghosts of the jedi council: so my first apprentice grogu has a mandalorian dad right? and he told me about how he rescued him and adopted him and how that’s custom for mandalorians, right? to adopt the children they rescue. so THEN i got hit with a tax bill for religious organizations and i thought you know what doesn’t get taxed? children. like when you have a child. you’re not paying the government for having a child. SO i thought you know what i ain’t payin the government shit-

force ghost obi-wan: but isn’t leia the chancellor?

luke: EXACTLY imagine paying taxes to your sister!!! i’d rather die. anyway that’s how i ended up with 15 children. they’re all skywalkers.

yoda: force-sensitive, some of them are not.

luke: yes. your point?

mandalors

the real luke skywalker is a devoted father and a tax evader that’s all there is to it

aniseandspearmint

Yet another way we were utterly ROBBED with the sequel trilogy

ohnoitstbskyen

… at the risk of reigniting Discourse™, what on earth is anyone in this thread talking about?

Like… literally the whole point of the movie is that Luke ISN’T himself when Rey meets him. He has, quite literally, fallen to the Dark Side.

Everything he has tried to build has turned to dust in his fingers, and even despite becoming the heroic saviour of the galaxy, he had to be confronted with the fact that his dark side will not leave him. He had to face the fact that even resisting the temptations of Palpatine and redeeming his father was not enough to help him overcome it once and for all.

Because Luke is his father’s son. For better: he has all of Anakin’s courage, all of his kindness, all of his hope and optimism and burning desire to make a better world. And for worse: he has all of his flaws. The anger, the temper, the furious love forged in trauma that so easily gets turned towards violence.

He looked at his nephew, the child of his best friend, and for just a moment felt the impulse to destroy an innocent in order to safeguard a future he’s desperate to protect. For just a moment, he felt what Anakin felt on Coruscant, walking into the temple to find the younglings.

Because (in his mind) he wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t good enough, wasn’t pure enough, his temple burns and his apprentices die and he loses Ben to the Dark Side. He fails himself, he fails Han, he fails Leia, he fails the galaxy he promised to protect. He fails as completely as his character possibly could.

And Luke is his father’s son. He has his father’s temperament, and his melancholy and loneliness, and his vulnerability to catastrophizing and spiraling. His is a family with a history of volatility and depression in response to intense trauma.

So when Rey finds him, yeah, you’re right, he isn’t Luke Skywalker anymore, because he is depressed to the brink of suicide, and has made every effort possible to kill Luke Skywalker away from the galaxy, short of turning the saber on himself. He has fallen to the Dark Side, and submerged his true soul in a dark, nihilistic, hopeless shell, just like his father did before him.

And on the subject of Rey being Luke’s adoptive daughter - hey, guess who redeems Luke from his nihilistic darkness, just as Luke redeemed Anakin? Luke’s sarcastic taunt that it’s stupid to expect him to just walk out and confront the entire First Order with a lightsaber becomes the moment of his greatest redemption when that is exactly what he does, and he does it because Rey believed in him.

Not only does Luke single-handedly face down an entire evil imperial army on his own and humiliate a Sith Lord in single combat, he does it non-violently. He does it by using what is inarguably THE most iconic and thematic Jedi Force power - the very first Force power we ever see anyone use, and the one most associated with his first teacher. From across the fucking galaxy, Luke Skywalker defeats an entire First Order army with a fucking Jedi Mind Trick.

And look, The Last Jedi has problems, and I can complain about them all day, but I simply will not accept the idea that the movie did any disservice to the character of Luke Skywalker, or to the original trilogy.

It uses George Lucas’ own most famous narrative philosophy, “it’s like poetry, it rhymes,” to explore Luke’s character as deeply as it possibly can. The original trilogy establishes with all the subtlety of an anvil that Luke has his father’s flaws, and the full capacity to become him, but rather than have Luke fall to darkness and become a Vader, it explores what falling to the Dark Side means for Luke, especially in light of his experiences.

He doesn’t become a Vader, a self-hating killer turning his inner turmoil into external violence (which is what Kylo, desperate Vader-fanboy, does. Hey, narrative parallels!). Rather he retreats into the reclusive “it’s not my business, I won’t get involved, stay on the farm and keep your head down” isolationist curmudgeon that his adoptive father Lars tried to raise him to be. He saw his father turn the violence outwards, so he turns it inwards instead, but the consequences are the same: it gives rise to an evil empire.

It’s like poetry, it rhymes.

Luke is saved from that fate because, as people point out above, Rey is so very like him, and it is her heart and her courage and her faith and her love that restores to him the light that he had lost. She literally brings him A New goddamn Hope. A future to believe in. Something for which it is worth attempting the impossible.

Luke becomes one with the Force after performing what I think is inarguably the greatest feat of Jedi Force mastery ever shown in a piece of Star Wars media; and he does it after confronting his darkest failure, the deepest representation of his fears and anxieties and self-hate (Kylo Ren), and telling him, to his face, “I did not fail, and I will not be the last Jedi.”

Again. People don’t have to like The Last Jedi. It is flawed. You don’t even have to like the version of Luke it presents, you have every right to have wanted a different take on him. But I simply cannot accept the idea that the movie did not respect or care deeply about his character because it demonstrably did. It cared about him enough to see his flaws, not just his qualities, and tell a story about the whole of him, warts and all.

Luke Skywalker’s character isn’t premised on simply being good and staying good - it’s about choosing good, especially when good is the hardest possible choice.

star wars the last jedi luke skywalker i absolutely do not want a story about luke being the best jedi ever i want a story about him making the choice to become the best jedi ever and i want him to fucking struggle with it because if he doesn't then the dark side isn't actually real and it isn't actually seductive