gaiabamman:

It is very important that the language in your novel reflects the time and place in which the story is set.

For example, my story is set in Italy. My characters would never “ride shotgun”, a term coined in US in the early 1900s referring to riding alongside the driver with a shotgun to gun bandits. 

Do your research! A free tool that I found to be very useful is Ngram Viewer. 

You can type any word and see when it started appearing in books. For example…one of my characters was going to say “gazillion” (I write YA) in 1994. Was “gazillion” used back then?

And the answer is…YES! It started trending in 1988 and was quite popular in 1994.

Enjoy ^_^

This is really important, especially because language can change in very unexpected ways. 

For example, did you know that before 1986 people never said “I need to”?Instead, they were far more likely to say “I ought to”, “I have to”, “I must”, or “I should”.

Don’t believe me?

Anyway, most people won’t notice subtle changes like that. But your reader will notice and be confused when characters in your medieval world use metaphors involving railroads and rockets.

One of the things you can do besides use Google Ngrams is to read books or watch movies written in the time period you want to set your story. The key here is that they can’t just be set in that time period, they have to have been made in that time period.

Also, there’s a Lexicon Valley episode on this very topic which I highly recommend. It’s called Capturing the Past. 

We’ve talked about 8tracks alternatives before, but it’s worth a reminder that if the 8tracks limit isn’t worth working around, there are a large number of other potential fanmix hosting sites!

Including playmoss, there is also spotify, hypster, soundcloud, apple music, youtube, pleer, suan, mixcloud, playlist, deezer and, of course, a host of downloading websites should you prefer that route. I recommend shopping around and cross-posting to your favorites to make your playlists even more accessible.

– Kai

Okay children, today we’re going to be turning this drab ass cap:

Into this glorious rainbow of quality:

I will be using PS CS5 for this night’s entertainment.

Step 1: BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING ELSE: grab yourself a cup of wine and some angry rock music, coloring is some frustrating shit.

Keep reading

hey, thanks for asking! the process is not difficult at all. 

(i’m assuming you already know how to make a gif, so i won’t be explaining that process.)

without anything done to it except being set to be in b+w, the gif looks like this:

(my frame speed is .07).

next, we’re going to invert the gif.

click the circled icon (found under adjustments) and you gif should look like this:

next, go to layer > new fill layer > gradient.

a menu will appear. you can rename the layer if you choose. hit OK.

another menu will appear. these are my settings:

i installed a gradient. this is not a default gradient in photoshop. i’m sure, though, that one of the preinstalled ones would look fine as well. 

click “OK” and your gif will look like this:

never fear, you’ll be able to see the text soon enough. 

with the gradient layer selected, go to the drop-down menu to the right of your screen. the default setting is “normal.” 

change it to either “screen” or “lighten.” in this case, i chose “screen.”

your gif should look this this!

aaand that’s it! file > export > save for web (legacy) and you’re all done!

(post this gif is from)

(looking back on the post, the gradient i used there was different. oops.) 

mythmonster:

minisplatling:

i never stop talking about some of these so i might as well banish them to a single post! you might know about a lot of them already, but feel free to look anyway

• Adobe Animate (Flash) → OpenToonz, Synfig Studio, or Pencil2D 
• Adobe Audition

  → Audacity

• Adobe Illustrator → Inkscape 
• Adobe Photoshop

  →

  GNU Image Manipulation Program or Paint.NET

• Adobe Premiere Pro/After Effects → Fusion, Shotcut, OpenShot, Natron, or Blender
• Autodesk Maya → Blender 
• Clip Studio Paint/Paint Tool SAI → Krita, FireAlpaca, (both also include animation tools!) or MediBang Paint
• FL Studio → LMMS
• Microsoft Office → Apache OpenOffice or Calligra Suite 
• Scrivener → Celtx (sort of?) or Evernote
• VLC media player →

  VLC media player lol

freeware can be a great opportunity to get a feel for something and learn a new skill. and in some cases, the free versions are almost as powerful, so you might find that you saved a lot of money but made work that was just about equal to what you might have done with paid software!

Note: I would suggest LibreOffice over OpenOffice, because LibreOffice is still being updated!

i didn’t even realize openoffice was discontinued… now I feel old!! I’ll edit the original post!