when i was a kid i was completely obsessed and enamored with the word art in microsoft word and when they got rid of it i was genuinely crushed. literally does not get any better than this i miss you so much babe
id spend 90% of the time on my school projects customizing word art for the titles till it was perfect. literally this
for the uninformed i would like to point out the many layers of this tweet:
the op, whose name is currently “captain a.c.a.b.”, is jeffrey cranor, writer of popular podcast “welcome to night vale”
the quote retweet is cecil baldwin, voice of said podcast, “welcome to night vale”
the tweet is liked by noelle stevenson, showrunner/creator of popular netflix show “she ra and the princesses of power”
the joke itself is comparing the tulsa trump rally to tumblr dashcon, which is a circa-2014 tumblr joke
which implies that all three of these internet pseudo celebs found the dashcon joke funny enough to like/retweet/quote-retweet im reeling
WELCOME TO NIGHT VALE WAS SCHEDULED TO PERFORM AT DASHCON YALL THEY PULLED OUT BUT THEY WERE THERE
They weren’t just there, they are indirectly the reason “an extra hour in the ball pit” became a meme.
See, there was supposed to be a WTNV live show at Dashcon, and admittance to it cost an additional $15 on top of the Dashcon ticket price. When the Night Vale crew got there, they were informed that the organizers did not have the money to pay them, so Cecil refused to perform.
Naturally then, the people who had paid for the show started demanding refunds of their $15. But the organizers claimed they didn’t have the money to offer refunds either, and instead offered to let those ticket holders spend an extra hour in the ball pit as a form of reimbursement. There were several posts going around about this, and the famous photo above was taken to illustrate how pathetic of an offer this was. And that’s how the Dashcon ball pit went down in infamy.
there’s another layer to this: noelle stevenson was an invited special guest at dashcon too. she had to moderate her own panel, and even worse - the con organizers didn’t pay for a hotel room for her, so she had to crash on the pull out couch in… the night vale team’s room.
so all of these people were in one room, at dashcon, getting screwed over by dashcon. this is a digital recreation of that hotel room 6 years later.
“But where’s that light coming from” BITCH IT’S FANTASY WHO CARES
Ok but also from a like, theatrical storytelling perspective, there’s a thing called “willful suspension of disbelief” which is basically the concept that in order to let ourselves be immersed and enjoy a story, we need to turn off our knowledge that it’s all fake anyway.
like yes, we all *know* it’s unrealistically bright for a night time war, but it needs to be so we can SEE the story being told, and the lighting designer used blue light to show it was night time. We KNOW that Sir Ian isn’t actually a wizard but we SUSPEND that DISBELIEF because we want to be entertained.
theres the moon, theres the stars, in this fantasy world the stars might be four times as bright or there might be two moons
or, considering this is a land without electric lights, its assumed that everyones eyes, including those of the viewers, have adjusted enough to the darkness that yes normal ass moon and stars provide sufficient illumination to actually see that the elf king is not wearing sweatpants like youd be able to tell or who the hell was that who just got stabbed thats kind of an important detail in an action scene
Elijah Wood said he brought this up with Andrew Lesnie, cinematographer on LOTR, once and asked him where the light was coming from in a particular scene, and Lesnie just smiled and said “same place as the music”.
