(AKA: What you do when you’re stuck at home and bored to tears)
So, one of the wilder things I did during the pandemic was build my own cyberpunk city to use for a music video shoot.
The bones of the project just uses completely randomly pieces of cardboard and other crap from my garage, randomly glued together into shapes that looked vaguely building-like, and spray-painted gray and black to look somewhat on-purpose.
(Party cups and left over toilet paper tubes just add to the aesthetic)
The next thing I did was add dramatic uplighting, because let’s face it… everything looks cooler and bigger and more intense if it’s uplit. Chunks of leftover LED strips work really well, and it’s really easy to isolate just the blue circuits. It creates the illusion of scale which is important for any model to look large.
Of course, no city is complete without BLINKY LIGHTS (and I’m sure you noted already there’s some blinky action on top of the towers here) so I spent a bunch of time googling blinking light circuits and experimenting with them on a breadboard before ultimately extending the wires to glue them to the buildings themselves.
(I got a basic electronics kit on Amazon for most of the components)
Then, I put white LED strips inside of the bigger buildings (a little trickier to isolate the W circuits but not impossible!) and poked holes to simulate lit windows for ultimate sci-fi street cred.
At this stage, things were looking pretty legit.
The “final” touch was to create a virtual billboard to go in one of the sections. I had an old first gen ipod touch that I made a little slot for and cobbled together a video loop for. (Don’t worry it’s not permanently installed or anything – it just slides in and out.)
… and of course what dystopian future is complete without flying cars…?
A little platform for a hotwheels car to go on (after it’s all painted green of course for the greenscreen.)
Insert some practical effects, some video-editing magic, and VOILA! … it’s CYBERPUNK TIME BAYBEE.
I was inspired by a post on here from literally years ago about making a city out of garbage and LED’s and decided to take it to the next level. I’m sure at some point I could save myself the trouble by learning how to 3D model but this was so much more fun.
I probably spent too much time on this but if you’re in any way curious about what the final result turned out to be, the video I built all of this for premieres on October 15th.
btw being excessively nonconfrontational is NOT a positive trait. it does not mean u are “too nice” or just too kind to hurt people, it means u have a problem communicating and you need to work on it.
There are people in the notes saying that the alternative reason is that they’re doing it because of trauma and i gotta say that
1) same. I did have this same problem and reason for doing it.
2) this is not actually an alternate reason. You guys also have a problem communicating and while you can trace exactly WHY you have trouble communicating that doesn’t mean it’s okay to treat everyone like they’re potentially your former abuser and that you DO still need to work on this.
‘This behavior comes from trauma’ and ‘This behavior is harmful to you, to others and to your relationships with others’ are two truths that can co-exist, and that do co-exist quite frequently.
Some of the most frustrating people I’ve ever dealt with were “nonconfrontational” which really meant that they were silent about problems until they built up enough grievances that the problem was irreconcilable, and then delivered an ultimatum without warning. Makes me SO FURIOUS every time.
“There is a time in my late 20s when everything broke open
and I temporarily could not function. And I am lucky that everything
finally broke, and I was lucky to find therapist(s) to teach me to ask
the questions that I ask all of you: ‘But what do you think would
happen if you just said ‘no, I don’t want to do it that way’? or ‘can we
change the subject now, please’? I swear it won’t be as terrible as you
think it will be, most people will just back off and apologize.’ They helped steer me away from my own horrified imaginings of how if I
ever pushed back at anyone I would immediately lose their regard and
respect for all time and no one would ever love me.
“… I placed this weird value on being laid back and easygoing, like that
is something you should always try to be. I think I’ve told people
‘It’s really hard to offend me or hurt my feelings, so don’t worry about (that really awful thing you just said).’
My relationships with others existed in a state of almost theological
pre-forgiveness. I also had that NiceGuy™ passive-aggressive quality
of assuming that just because I was so ‘nice’ all the time that people
owed me the same, and even though I hadn’t expressed my needs out loud.
How dare people not read my mind?
“…
What I found out in therapy is that I was not all that laid back. I
found out that I have a lot of rules for how I want other people to
treat me. I found out that I was in fact really angry about a lot of
things, and because I was not expressing that anger in a healthy or
timely way, it was all living inside of me, and it decided that if it
couldn’t get out it was okay with being really angry at me and pointing
out all of my faults instead. Hello, Jerkbrain! And I learned the word ‘boundaries,’ and I started to stand up for myself in small ways and
then in bigger ways and the world did not end and people did not hate me
and it became easier to be awkward than to seethe.”
There’s an etiquette to typo roasting. Like if they type “on” instead of “in” you overlook that. That’s some autocorrect bs. But if they type “pebis” or some shit that’s when you gotta get his ass
Something that gets to me about Farscape is that John Crichton was raised on science fiction, and he falls into a world where his only frame of reference is stories. Time and time again, he falls into stories he’s familiar with–and it’s a coin flip whether he gets to be the hero. Yes, he’s OUR protagonist, but he’s not always THE protagonist.
He falls into a soul-wrenching conflict with his mortal energy that, story wise, seems like it SHOULD move his enemy to forgiveness. It doesn’t. He gains some insight, but not the cathartic release a story would give. He falls back into time and, by treating the situation like a time-travel story, he causes deaths he’ll never forgive himself for.
Everyone else on the ship is, for the most part, in a similar boat. The narratives they have to work with are frequently thwarted and turned against them, and it works so well. Not always satisfying in the ways that we come to expect, no, but compelling nonetheless.
i think the internets terrible superpower is taking an observably lame thing one or two people might do and then making an entire associated trait out to be a moral failing
when a conversation was started about how adults online and in fandom spaces had a tendency to interact inappropriately with other fans or the content creators it was to reach out to people who should know how to better behave with the idea of making online spaces better for everyone
except now theres an entire population of people who thinks if you exist online or have interests past the age of 20 you deserve to die a cringe hellfire death for eternity as if. everyone is not gonna age beyond 20 and have interests still. idk the fear of aging online being directly fed by a goal for internet safety/boundaries is so sad to me
honestly its not even about getting offline as much as it is cultivating the people you surround yourself with/what mantras you repeat to urself. i think too, because a lot of people who think this way have been hurt BY adults, they start to form this inherent belief that all adults are evil
it wasnt the entire reason but my fear of aging was pretty heavily tied into my inability to imagine a future for myself/desire to not exist past 18 when i was a kid. (one part because i didnt trust adults one part because i was miserable bc of a looott of other stuff going on.)
but now that im Here and ive decided to stick around, looking back and younger people who have the same fears and turn it outward (ie being openly mocking and hostile of adults simply for expressing their interests and joy past an ‘acceptable’ [to beauty standard, consumable] age) it makes me Really sad knowing theyre either gonna have a really harsh wakeup call like i did or spend their entire adulthood wishing to be a kid again when they dont… have to lose anything they liked about being a kid. theyre just Bigger now
but yeah. its actually nice being an adult. im trying to be one that might make people a little less scared to grow up too. not selflessly, entirely, but for little me too.
ALT