Batfort

Style reveals substance

Category: Rhetoric & Aesthetics (page 5 of 7)

Weaponized fashion styling

2017-12-13 / / 0 Comments

Clothes are just as much about communication as they are about preventing one from walking down the street naked.

Clothes can say everything from “I’m not that kind of girl” to “I’m the next President of the United States of America.”

I love how this scene from My Father is Strange illustrates how important clothes can be when preparing oneself for battle.

“Fur trumps everything,” says the status-oriented mother (nevermind that fur is a ridiculous choice in the summer months).

Meanwhile, the practicality-oriented mother shows up looking far better than the other team ever would have thought.

The clothes do just as much talking as the people.

This is why you should have your personal equivalent of a “power suit” in your wardrobe. There are times when you (and I) need to perform our best–that is the time to pull out your best garment.

“Best” is subjective in this case.

But this garment should make you feel badass. Invincible. Completely protected. Confident to the point of aggressive.

It can be difficult to find these magic garments (LOL MORMON JOKE) but it’s worth it.

Especially if you have to go up against a Tiger Mother who also happens to be your landlord.

Image of the Week: Judgement edition

2017-12-08 / / 0 Comments

Because, really, what describes the current climate in Hollywood better than this?

Ten or so years ago, I was really into celebrity gossip. It was one of those short, intense addictions that I fell into because I like a constant stream of new information.

Twitter does that for me now.

Anyhow, most of it was garden-variety People magazine stuff, but I also gravitated toward the blind item sites like Crazy Days and Nights. That is, until I realized how sordid and awful a lot of the stuff was that I was reading about.

I didn’t quite make the connection to the real world.

Well, Crazy Days and Nights is back, and seems to be a player in helping to expose all of the awfulness and corruption in the entertainment industry.

Funny how things go full circe.

Also “funny” how LA is literally on fire right now.

Coming soon

2017-12-02 / / 0 Comments

Image of the week: random phone edition

2017-11-24 / / 0 Comments

I’m sure that if you’re anything like me, you save various amusing or informative pics from Twitter when they swim across your timeline.

Maybe you saw this one recently.

It made me chuckle.

It makes you laugh, because it’s a visual representation of the obvious joke that pointing out the truth (it’s okay to be white), is heresy to the modern orthodoxy.

But then, I start to think about how much of a “church” social justice has become. I start to think about the Catholic church before the reformation. How hierarchical it was. How corrupt it was. How obsessed with appearances it was.

It’s hard to think of SJWism as a “church,” because it is so loosely structured and doesn’t run our society in name. It certainly runs our society in many areas, and tries to squeeze itself into the areas that it hasn’t yet taken over. But it’s not institutionalized, not in the same way that the church was, so it’s easy to overlook. Or dismiss away.

The cardinals of SJWism don’t all wear the same fancy robes, nor do the acolytes. Rank-and-file SJWs tend to have distinctive modes of dress (the Tumblrina, the Soyboy, the Antifa), but the higher ranked officials often skate by because they look like every other globalist cuck politician.

The victim mentality also goes a great deal of effort to convince us that they’re the victims, of course they aren’t in charge or exerting any tyranny of the minority.

Other people have written more and better about SJWs than I ever will, but it’s fun to think about sometimes.

New (to me) design choices in the sports arena

2017-11-23 / / 0 Comments

As an old millennial,  the motion graphics that I grew up with were clunky, low-res, and…frankly, I was old enough to remember when channels started displaying the score of the game onscreen while the game was going on. As that idea evolved, graphics tended to mimic those found on network TV news–self-consciously 3D, lots of gradients and unnecessary moving parts.

In some ways, the graphics on TV sports games were the flashy sports cars of the design world.

Nowadays, I rarely watch sports-related programming on TV. Or streaming. Or in any way, really. The last time I sought any programming out for myself was when the Seahawks wore head-to-toe highlighter green during a game sometime last year. That was fun.

So it is really strange to be home with my folks and see flat, gradient-free design on ESPN2.

It makes sense that hipster graphic designers need jobs, and get jobs with sports-related entities just as much as they get job for music companies and fashion brands, but it is just weird to my eyes to see a more modern, clean, simply, flat, bold approach to design for football- and basketball-related material.

I’m happy to see some simplicity on the TV screen.

It’s also interesting to watch the “trickle down effect” in play in visual graphics. (AND THEY SAID IT WOULDN’T WORK.)

That said, it doesn’t feel like the people who watch sports are also the ones who would appreciate minimalist or clever design. Sports, to me, should be fairly like a sports car–functional, refined, a bit flashy.

Unlike a boutique fashion publication, the focus shouldn’t be on the design work (or on figuring out which school’s logo you’re looking at), but on the sports events themselves.

Good thing the gradient hasn’t totally disappeared:

Hah.

Photo editing impacts fashion styling

2017-11-15 / / 0 Comments

It’s the power of cropping, folks.

I never realized what I huge difference the crop can make. The potential difference is rather obvious when it comes to composition (at least, for any of us 90s kids who grew up watching the “formatted for your TV” version of so many movies — I still remember that moment when I realized that the VHS version cropped out 30% of each shot!), since the surface area show of a photo directly impacts what parts of its subject are shown.

However, you wouldn’t think that the crop of a photo would mess with the styling impact of its subject.

You would be wrong.

Now, keep in mind that K-pop groups are usually styled for group effect, so that particular tropes and/or colors are balanced among the members. This outfit set was clearly designed for Wendy at the center (for once!!).

Consider this photo of Red Velvet that was posted on allkpop earlier today.

Top: Yeri, Joy, Irene / Bottom: Wendy, boots, Seulgi

Not bad. They look good — no clashing reds — and other than the fact that plaid-clad Wendy is not in the center of the photo, all seems to be well.

Except…Joy’s black boots. They stick out like a sore thumb. Even though they are similar in shape and tone to Joy and Seulgi’s long dark hair, there is something eye-pulling and offputting about those dang boots. They don’t belong in that sea of red.

As a result, the photo seems off balance. This is exacerbated by the fact that the torsos of the girls in the bottom row have been dramatically shortened by the crop, also lending an off-balance feel.

Here’s the original photo:

Much better, right?

Those boots just fade into the background, leaving a naturally-occuring visual hole that would have otherwise been filled by the dark wood of the stops behind the group.

The girls can breathe, the color palette makes sense — the bottle green floor makes a huge difference in offsetting all that red — and the spacing is not overly formal but still balanced.

This is a picture that makes sense.

The memetics of milk and cereal

2017-10-25 / / 0 Comments

First, it was milk. (Thank you for that, Shia.)

Now, it’s cereal.

What’s next, cookies?

 

There are literal Hitlers under every bed and inside every closet, it seems.

Memes are becoming reality at an increasingly rapid pace.

The line between mindset and meatspace is becoming increasingly blurred.

 

Earlier this week, I was checking out kids books for a friend’s daughter.

There was a whole section of Berenstein Bears.

I couldn’t bear to check the spelling.

 

Think it, and it will exist.

Terrifying or exhilarating?

You get to decide.

Image of the week: Eat Your Meat edition

2017-10-20 / / 0 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about carnivory. (Mostly because I don’t want to wax poetic about poop on this blog but that’s another story for another day.)

One of the lines of argument that carnivores use against the constant cries that “you simply HAVE to eat vegetables!” is the anatomy argument. Where ruminants have 27 thousand different stomachs to digest all that grass, humans have one. Much like carnivores, we also have sharp teeth and high acid content in our stomachs.

There are lots of studies and arguments and graphs that show why humans are built more like carnivores than they are like herbivores. There’s plenty of anecdotal data (if you’ve ever read a vegan forum) of people’s digestive systems getting completely wrecked by a vegan diet. Again, statistics and numbers and arguments.

Then, there’s this:

A succinct argument in meme form. Boom, done. QED.

I can’t stop laughing.

 

On the personal front, switching to an all animal product diet has been one of the best decisions that I’ve made in recent years. I haven’t eaten a plant-based product for five months, and while healing is slow, it’s been fairly steady.

As I’ve searched for “natural” methods to control my autoimmune illness, I’ve focused (perhaps overly so) on diet. After a while, I felt like I could blame everything on what I ate. Taking a whole host of variables out of my diet has revealed how much variability in symptoms has absolutely nothing to do with what I eat. In fact, the lack of margin with food highlights just how much stress or lack of sleep impacts my health. I’m still terrible at exercising regularly, but I’m seeing a few glimmers of how exercise could provide some immediate, direct impacts.

My only diet-related issue is that I keep eating cheese. I have found that raw-milk cheddar is the best option, and eaten only in conjunction with meat. Otherwise, it doesn’t provide enough “matter” for my digestive system to tackle seriously.

Overall, though, no regrets. I may just be able to make it work without drugs. And that, my friends, I never thought that I could say.

Unexpected color palette

2017-10-15 / / 0 Comments

Colors are fun. A cohesive color palette can be even funner. And it’s funnest when you run across those color palettes in the wild.

Take, for instance, this twitter photo:

 

Guys. I love a good green/blue color scheme. It’s the color of trees and sky on a clear summer day — God’s perfect creation.

Add a little bit of yellow for sizzle and gray for grounding? Get outta here.

Abstracted from the photo, this reminds me of a sophisticated take on the Seattle Seahawks.

Or, perhaps a relaxed bank or financial firm. Lots of green to make you think of money, but in a youthful way. Gotta sucker those Millennials into taking on more debt before Gen Z comes of age.

When a random documentary photo is enticing enough to make you want to live there, I think the color palette will be welcoming too.

Now that I think about it, I might lessen the influence of that bright blue and put it on par with the yellow, offsetting with more of the green color.

But that’s just quibbling about the price.

The end.

Image of the week

2017-10-13 / / 0 Comments

The week in Twitter has been absolutely dominated by the Harvey Weinstein scandal.

Because I’ve also been thinking about “columns” for this blog, or some way to make content a little more coherent (perhaps that’s premature since I’ve not even hit 6 months posting yet?), I figured I’d make an “Image of the Week” idea. Part of the reason I started this blog was to push myself into more visual analysis, and I seem to be doing most of that in fashion and not in the visual world around us.

This image struck me as a good summary of the week, because it visually reads “Hollywood” but thematically reads “Lawsuit.”

The phrase “you may be entitled to financial compensation” takes me straight back to being sick on the couch as a kid, watching the daytime commercials for class-action lawsuits against mesothelioma during the breaks in The Price is Right.

via The People’s Cube

This week has been a painful reminder that probably every “pop” culture thing that we like is tainted by someone’s pain or suffering (and not in the cathartic art way).

This week I also learned that it is Wine-steen, not Wine-stine. Oops.

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