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For the 24 years I’ve been teaching creative writing, the stories I see have predominantly been about white people, or characters that mysteriously don’t have any declared ethnicity or race at all. This is true no matter the number of students of color in the class, and no matter the amount of writing I assign by writers of color, and even, to my surprise, no matter the declared radical politics of the students. In general, the beginner fiction that writers produce is what they think a story looks like. Those stories are often not really stories — they are ways of performing their relationship to power. They are stories that let them feel connected to the dominant culture.

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You Have to Pay a Subscription to Use Pantone Colors in Photoshop Now | PetaPixel

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Barker then turned his attention to his fellow author J.K. Rowling, who has had her fair share of controversy over the last few years over her opinions on the transgender community. “There’s a lot of pain amongst the transgender people that I know,” Barker stated. “They have a lot of issues in the world as it is, without a famous author opining on the subject. It just seems redundant. It just seems unkind.”

Noting Rowling’s vast financial success, Barker felt that Rowling’s newfound position of fame ought to exclude her from discussing trans rights. He added, “It really just seems redundant for a woman as successful, as validated in the world, as Ms Rowling, to be negative, to be disruptive if you will, to a very beaten up subculture. These are human beings. She has no right to opine, I think, upon the lives of human beings that she does not know.”

“I feel very protective of people who are on the edge of our culture as gay people still are,” Barker continued. “And certainly transgender people are on the edge of our culture. And here you have one of the most successful people in the frigging world – Ms Rowling. Going after a very emotionally vulnerable portion of our culture. It just seems unnecessary and unfair.”

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The Good, the Bad and the Living Dead: How the Zombie Apocalypse Replaced the Western

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COVID-19 mortality rate five times higher among labor, retail and service workers, study reveals

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Smart Streetlights are Casting a Long Shadow Over Our Cities - Failed Architecture

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What Happened When Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Disappeared - Bitcoin Magazine - Bitcoin News, Articles and Expert Insights

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The Obsessive Pleasures of Mechanical-Keyboard Tinkerers | The New Yorker

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Horse Isle 3, War Crimes and LGBTQ+ Visibility – A case study in how NOT to approach Community Management — The Mane Quest

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Chess Is Just Poker Now - The Atlantic

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Plastic Recycling Doesn't Work and Will Never Work - The Atlantic

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Less traffic jams with a 9-euro ticket - Analysis of Tomtom data - Economy - News in Germany

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slavery exists today in commercial agriculture, with several cases just in Florida affecting 1200 people in the past 15 years

it’s important to acknowledge the domestic enslavement living through prisons and the police, but this system absolutely includes the borders and immigration laws, which exist to produce a slave class of workers who are quite literally non-citizens with no rights so that capitalists can exploit them and retaliate with deportation, often to homelands torn by war or poverty because of the U.S./the West.

there’s a book here, Fields of Resistance, that’s really informative. I’m in the middle of it but it’s been great so far

tldr: borders exist to enslave people

Abolish borders, abolish prisons, abolish ICE, abolish the police. They’re different machines of the same system

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To get work, the houses bid on a project; they are all trying to come in right under one another’s bids. With Marvel, the bids will typically come in quite a bit under, and Marvel is happy with that relationship, because it saves it money. But what ends up happening is that all Marvel projects tend to be understaffed. Where I would usually have a team of ten VFX artists on a non-Marvel movie, on one Marvel movie, I got two including myself. So every person is doing more work than they need to.

The other thing with Marvel is it’s famous for asking for lots of changes throughout the process. So you’re already overworked, but then Marvel’s asking for regular changes way in excess of what any other client does. And some of those changes are really major. Maybe a month or two before a movie comes out, Marvel will have us change the entire third act. It has really tight turnaround times. So yeah, it’s just not a great situation all around. One visual-effects house could not finish the number of shots and reshoots Marvel was asking for in time, so Marvel had to give my studio the work. Ever since, that house has effectively been blacklisted from getting Marvel work.

I remember going to a presentation by one of the other VFX houses about an early MCU movie, and people were talking about how they were getting “pixel-fucked.” That’s a term we use in the industry when the client will nitpick over every little pixel. Even if you never notice it. A client might say, “This is not exactly what I want,” and you keep working at it. But they have no idea what they want. So they’ll be like, “Can you just try this? Can you just try that?” They’ll want you to change an entire setting, an entire environment, pretty late in a movie.

The main problem is most of Marvel’s directors aren’t familiar with working with visual effects. A lot of them have just done little indies at the Sundance Film Festival and have never worked with VFX. They don’t know how to visualize something that’s not there yet, that’s not on set with them. So Marvel often starts asking for what we call “final renders.” As we’re working through a movie, we’ll send work-in-progress images that are not pretty but show where we’re at. Marvel often asks for them to be delivered at a much higher quality very early on, and that takes a lot of time. Marvel does that because its directors don’t know how to look at the rough images early on and make judgment calls. But that is the way the industry has to work. You can’t show something super pretty when the basics are still being fleshed out.