#I know I draw some rather niche and self-indulgent content...

[kobochasketch]

To everyone that leaves sweet little tag comments on my drawings: I see you, you are valid, and I appreciate you SO MUCH. <3 Ya’ll are absolutely precious and make my day every time. Thank you! (´°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥ω°̥̥̥̥̥̥̥̥｀)

[xtrippydragonx]

About Me

Why am I doING THIS FUCK HOW DO YOU WRITE THESE

Uhhh sup, y’all can call my Casey or Rex. I’m 21 (birthday is May 29th), a woman, and I like to draw and play vidya gamez. I’m also autistic so if I ever seem awkward in an interaction, that’s probably why lmao. Most of my blog consists of the stuff you’d typically expect on a tumblr blog; funny posts and fandom stuff. It is also worth noting that as I am an adult, this blog will occasionally contain content with adult themes.

This blog is basically just for my niche interests/hyperfixations and random shit. On this blog, you’ll find (almost exclusively reblogged) content for the following:

Corpse Bride (I’m most known for this hyperfixation)

Popee the Performer

Pokèmon

Doki Doki Literature Club (Yuri IS best girl and I WILL fight you in a Denny’s parking lot over this)

Breath of the Wild (Yes my favorite champion is Mipha, no I am not ok)

Danganronpa (mostly V3 but sometimes the other games as well)

Warrior Cats (Runningnose is my favorite character)

Minecraft

Left 4 Dead

Criminal minds

Here’s some other things I’m interested in but either haven’t really had a chance to dive into, or aren’t hyperfixations:

Kid Icarus: Uprising

Tales From Moominvalley (I’m also somewhat interested in The Moomins Return!)

Beastars

ENA

Payday (the second game, specifically)

Bojack Horseman

The Walten Files

Harmony and Horror

Five Nights at Freddy’s

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

SCP Foundation

Sally Face

Poppy Playtime (wanna be clear that no, I do not support the creators morally and have no plans to support them financially- but the game is cool and the talent that the devs put into it is worth acknowledging!)

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure (I’ve only watched the anime tho so I’m currently clueless abt anything past Stone Ocean lmao)

The Blacklist

One Piece (RIP Ryunosuke ;-; I promise that’s not a spoiler lmao)

Zombieland Saga

My ask box is always open! Whether you wish to discuss theories or opinions about a shared fandom, get to know me better, or anything else, you’re always welcome to send something my way! I love and am honored when people are interested in my ramblings, so never worry that you’re bothering me or anything, I promise you’re not.

Sometimes you’ll occasionally see some random tags on a post I’ve rebloged. This is a guide to what they mean!

‘Favs’: my favorite posts! Sometimes they’re fandom related, sometimes I just think they’re funny.

‘S.I’: stands for “self indulgent”, it’s basically a tag of me being thirsty for fictional characters (mostly Victor Van Dort). Fair warning, a good portion of it is NSFW because I have brain rot and need to be banished to the shadow realm bc horny jail isn’t enough for me anymore.

‘Answered asks’: every ask I’ve answered, compiled under a tag for your convenience! If you’re interested in my thoughts/opinions/theories/etc about corpse bride, this tag is a good place to start.

‘Might come in handy’: things that I want to save incase I need them later. Mostly drawing references/tutorials, but there’s some other things scattered about this tag as well.

‘Vent tag’: A tag where I can reblog posts with ideas or feelings I strongly relate to; I tag all my negative reblog posts with this. It will likely contain themes of depression, anxiety, trauma, suicidal ideation, etc. If this sort of content is a trigger, I would recommend blacklisting this tag.

‘A hot original on tungle dot hellsite’: all of the posts that I’ve made! This tag is a WIP so bear with me lol.

Also, please note that I am only human, and, again, autistic. This means that I may sometimes say or do the wrong thing. If I do this, it is probably because of human error, rather than malice. Please assume this is the case and let me know so I can correct my mistake. I try to make sure I don’t reblog from anyone sketchy but sometimes I can’t find a post anywhere else so if that occurs, reblogging does NOT equal endorsement here!!

Whelp, that’s about all I can think of for now. I’ll probably update this post as time goes on! Thanks a lot for reading; I hope you enjoy your visit to my little corner of the internet! Stay as long as you need, traveler /ᐠ๑•ω•ᐟ\ฅ

[laurelnose]

new year update

- I am, in fact, still alive, I guess. almost surprising, tbh! doing a little better—still not great, but better. it’s cool, I don’t expect miracles from myself.

- thank you everyone for all the well-wishes. i can’t respond to everything individually but i do appreciate all of them and all of you 💛

- i’ve been thinking about if/how I want to start re-engaging with fandom. definitely I want to change some things about the way I do fandom in 2021, as debilitating mood disorder aside, I’m pretty dissatisfied with the current state of affairs. just for one, my audience is larger than i ever expected it to get and i need to re-evaluate some stuff.

- @eskelchopchop​ tagged me in that 5-favorite-things-you-created-in-2020 thing, & I thought yeah, it’s probably a good idea to take some time to meditate a bit on the things I managed to create this year. made me realize I did make a fair amount of stuff I forgot about and that was nice to remember! so, thanks for the tag, i appreciate it. cutting for length!

rules: it’s time to love yourselves! choose your 5 (ish) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2020. tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want (fan or original) so we can spread the love and link each other to awesome works!

so…we’re going to do this two different ways. here’s the self-promotion the challenge was asking for: my top five favorite fanworks I posted this year, no particular order.

On Monsters as Invasive Species: this meta essay was a response to a tumblr ask, but it was so goddamn long and at the time I did not want to post anything to tumblr, so I tidied it up for AO3, which also let me do real footnotes!! anyways it’s about monsters, invasive species, and extinction events, and i’m very pleased with how it came out. my thoughts on the topic were super knotty and I wasn’t even sure what conclusion I would end up coming to when I started trying to formulate my response to this question, so ironing all my drafts out into something coherent took some effort, but it was worth it. (& yeah i’ll still probably post the actual ask response here at some point.)

Medieval clothing studies, ft. Yennefer: just really pleased with the hatching on these! I’m trying to get more adventurous with my use of black in my inking, usually to mixed success, and I love how these ended up turning out. plus, the whole process of doing the studies was a lot of fun. also pretty proud of the matching Lambert set but that doesn’t exist on the internet lmao

The library catalogue at Kaer Morhen: extremely niche & self-indulgent oc content with some of the cuter baby geralts I’ve ever done? yes. i am still unsure if this qualifies as a “joke,” but it’s hilarious to me. plus, the number of people not in witcher fandom who said they reblogged it solely for the accurate depiction of libraries was very flattering.

baby eskeralt tackles: this was one of seventeen art prompts I did over the course of three days, which I feel was a pretty heroic drawing effort!! bit of a toss-up between this one and the eskeralt kiss for which one is my favorite, but this one turned out exactly like I wanted it to and I really love the movement and expression I achieved with it. (it just so happens the kiss is reversed in my notebooks: on paper, eskel’s on the right, and I was halfway through when I decided I wanted their scars visible and opted to flip the art in post rather than redo my entire sketch, so the baby witcher piece has a bit of an edge for actually looking the way it does in real life.)

rotfiend reproduction: this isn’t exactly meta so much as just a goofy headcanon post, but it’s a thing I created and fuck, I just love this headcanon a lot, okay, it’s so bonkers off-the-wall and yet also reasonably canon-based, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to top “rotfiend sex requires explosions.” legitimately my monster bio peaked early with this one

and for the second way: thinking about everything I created this year, I realized that while the challenge specifically asks for links, many of my favorites never made it onto the internet. so I’m just going to mention those briefly because they were my actual top five!

Sigurður Hjartarson (+ cover art)

the character design bible I did for Gill

City of Animal Electricity

The Obsidian Star

Open Hand or Closed Fist

if you made it all the way down here, thanks for reading. i have no idea which of my mutuals have or haven’t done this at this point so i’m just going to tag @she-who-drank-vodka-with-cats​ and @kerasines/@witcherrarepair and if anyone else would like to do it, feel free to say I tagged you, and may the new year be good to you 💛

[unwilling-survivor]

Lately I’ve been considering why I enjoy writing with the people I write with. Here are some things I love about my writing partners (excuse me if things seem repetitive; it’s late):

1) collaboration

Basically, we’re working together. With my favorite writing partners, we talk a lot out of character. We work together, plotting, sharing “oh yknow what might be cool,” and really making every story a collaborative effort. It’s not about one character coming out on top, and when it is, it’s discussed and determined ahead of time. My expectations are set exactly where they should be. I can say “hey, what’s your goal in this scene” and we can work toward it together.

2) cooperation, not competition

One of my few complaints with partners I’ve had in the past (and this is my whole past, keep in mind I’ve been doing this on and off over fifteen years) is a focus on making their character the winner, even when there is no fight. Frequently this comes out as godmoding or blindsiding their partner with unagreed upon actions or reactions. Sometimes, this is in a fight, and it manifests as a character being OP or, essentially, negating any attack against them. Dodging every strike like it doesn’t matter, ignoring all mind games because they (in character) know better.

If you are going to win no matter what, there is no point in fighting. Or, perhaps, the only point in fighting is the losing character exhibiting determination in the face of futile odds. My number one pet peeve is a character that refuses to be affected by other characters. All characters have insecurities and weaknesses. Not just the big stuff, but little things too. Ignoring your rp partner in favor of pushing your own narrative is not role playing, it’s fanfiction of your own character. By that, I mean there is no reason to even have a writing partner if your characters aren’t having an effect on each other. (You can probably tell this is my number one pet peeve.)

I am lucky enough to have writing partners that really cooperate instead of competing. Even when my character is losing (and Sam so often does), she’s making some kind of impact. Even the strongest characters are still affected by other characters. Perhaps merely inconvenienced or annoyed, but they don’t just shrug them off. (I could vent about this for pages, honestly, my point is only that I am thankful to have partners who avoid this issue.)

3) enthusiasm

My partners are invested in our work together. I’m happy to have that. I like that we want to talk about things because we’re excited to see where things go and/or excited to see things come to fruition.

4) motivated? aspirational? Not sure what to call it, honestly

We have goals, plots, arcs we want to make happen. Maybe it’s because I love drama, but I like my threads to have purpose (...even if that purpose is just smut). Slice of life threads are rare for me (though I do love pre-established relationships for happenings offscreen that I don’t think would be interesting to write). I like high stakes, and I am so happy to have writing partners who also enjoy that. Big stories. I like big stories. The fact that my partners and I have joked about watching the show of our characters? That feels like a good sign that things are interesting and have both stakes and pacing.

5) in a similar vein: self-indulgent

Introduction threads were fun when I was younger, but I grew old and highly self-indulgent. My attention span is short, my time is limited, and I’d rather have three threads I’m super enthusiastic about than ten I’m not particularly invested in. Yes, I know, many people probably can frown at my writing— it’s fair, I’m very ship-centric, but it’s because I know what I get excited about. I know my niche and my preferences, and those are romance, angst (particularly hurt/comfort), smut, and violence/horror. Of course I won’t knock others for their preferences - and sometimes really enjoy reading other types of threads - but it’s also unlikely I’ll actively engage in that sort of content (jokey threads, for instance).

As stated before, I LOVE pre-established relationships offscreen - allies, casual friends, co-workers, etc. - but I’m writing a tv show in my head. How often does a tv show include a water cooler scene that isn’t about furthering a larger plot? That is how I feel about a lot of low-stakes threads. I am therefor spoiled by partners willing to indulge me in drama that plays to my interests. That’s not to say every idea I have fits or works, but I adore that more often than not, when I suggest complicating things, the idea is legitimately considered, maybe tweaked, and (potentially) added.

6) F L O W

I adore my partners for creating stories that connect and flow. We have timelines where threads affect each other. For instance, in archiving for my main tumblr-verse ship, I can trace the acts. Not only can I trace the acts of the relationship, I am drawing the relationship development through events between the characters but also between other characters.

For a specific example, I’m talking about Jam. In compiling the third act of their relationship - what Reggie and I lovingly referred to as “the trauma thread” among other things - I had to include 1) art of a photo sent ic to another love interest, 2) Bass’s retaliation for that photo on Sam, 3) Bass’s retaliation for that photo on Jed, 4) Sam’s separate interaction in which she killed someone for the first time (Julie, who was referencing a previous thread), and then, finally, 5) the thread where both Jed and Sam, feeling broken from their experiences, recognized something different in the other. So, not just the thread of the two of them interacting, but the events that combined to give that thread weight.

Anyway. My point is, with such a long post: I am very greatful to the amazing partners I’ve had. I’d love to have more partners that hold to similar rp goals and values.

[alohaemora]

Hello Alohaemora. This is the same anonymous user that commented about your work on FanFiction.Net. One of my favorite stories is “Sunday Dinner” because I like how you expanded the Smith family! I’m wondering if you have any more headconnans about them? Are they all redheads like the Weasleys? I know canonically Zacharius is blonde but his father, daughter and his sister Audrey are redheads. Speaking of his daughter I know Albus ends up marrying her in your timeline. How did that come to be?

Ah, Sunday Dinner. Probably one of the most niche, self-indulgent fics I've ever written, so it is incredibly touching when readers tell me they enjoy it - thank you, Anon!! I wrote it mostly for the opportunity to pen down some of my long-standing headcanon about the Smith family. Zacharias Smith might be the only Hufflepuff in the entire series that Harry genuinely dislikes (and for good reason). I've decided that the Smiths are descended from Helga Hufflepuff, drawing on what we know about Hepzibah Smith from HBP - quite a stretch, I know, given how common the surname "Smith" is in the UK, but I liked the idea of Zacharias coming from old money, the spoiled "heir" of a family of rather unpleasant, haughty Hufflepuffs. And honestly, I really wanted to write the line: "I think Helga Hufflepuff would wish she never procreated if she knew our family would turn out to be her last living descendants." 😂

(More rambling headcanon below the cut ↓)

I enjoy exploring pure-blood class dynamics - and I'm especially fond of exploring that murky gray area made up of families who are well-to-do and prideful about their heritage, who are not Death Eaters and yet do not side with Dumbledore. It's an interesting middle ground to explore and one that is probably bigger than we realize, reading the series from Harry's perspective, surrounded as he is by the Order of the Phoenix (who make up such a small percentage of the Wizarding world). Infuriating as it is to think/write about, a considerable majority of wizards are surely content to misjudge the political climate from the security and privacy of their homes - even those descended from a bastion of loyalty, dedication, and fair play, Helga Hufflepuff herself.

And so, the Smith family emerged in my imagination, made up of Zacharias (b. 1981), his parents, and his four older sisters (Eleanor, b. 1968; Catherine, b. 1970; Audrey, b. 1973; and Sally Marie, b. 1979). I wanted Audrey to come from a stilted background, to have a strained relationship with her family - I HC her meeting Percy in DH, and I thought it would give them some interesting common ground. Both middle children, both dealing with feelings of disillusionment with the Ministry (where they work). You asked if I have any other HCs about the Smith family, and I do have plenty of little ideas between the lines, but for the sake of not taking up too much space on people's feeds, I'll share a couple things:

1. In "Sunday Dinner," I mention that one of Zacharias Smith's brothers-in-law is Ernie Macmillan's older brother. I liked the detail in OotP of Zacharias eavesdropping on Ernie and Hannah as they discuss the DA with Hermione; I HC Zacharias and Ernie having some long-standing hostility between them that began when they were young children, watching their older siblings date. We read the series from Harry's POV, who had no contact with Wizarding society until he was 11, but I think Wizarding families must see quite a lot of each other, given how small the magical world supposedly is.

2. Audrey, a Hufflepuff born in early 1973, would have shared a dormitory with Tonks. They weren't close friends or anything, but it's hard to share a space with someone for 7 years and not get to know them at least a little. I quite like the idea of Teddy having someone in his life (besides his grandmother, of course) who knew his mother in a different context than the Order - something Harry didn't have with his own mum.

[metamodel]

Piss, Bread and Circuses

Hello again. I recently visited the Australian Film, Television and Radio School for their latest Re:Frame event, which was about audience engagement in the attention economy. After just ten minutes, I wanted to stab my eyes with a pencil.

Station ident: After returning to design after a year away, I find that Everything Now Looks Very Strange Indeed™. This is another one of my updates on restarting a creative practice (which I’m calling Studio Thing), plus a dose of cultural and design commentary.

Ah yes, the eye-stabbing. I can imagine many interesting conversations about attention in a post-broadcast media world, but when this event opened with a keynote from self-proclaimed “Data Whisperer” Elisa Choy, they were almost occluded in advance. Choy’s talk represented everything that might be dubious about the meeting of Big Data and creative strategy: figuring her audience as a bunch of panicked TV executives, she opined about the declining ratings of big tentpole shows like MasterChef. As a panacea for this non-problem, Choy offered her data-whispering “methodology”: ambulance-chasing the public’s roiling opinions on social media, which we can then mirror by creating the Right Content™. Pet-swapping is hot, so we should make shows about pet-swapping! I kid you fucking not.

[caption align="alignnone" width="980"]

The death spiral of bread and circuses[/caption]

Look, I know, feedback loops have the potential to enable many things, but they’re not necessarily positive, and here I have to take a stand: this particularly impoverished approach to data and culture represents the tightening of a noose around society’s neck. Rather than opening up possibilities in cultural production, the weaponisation of social media metrics to slavishly create What the Public Wants only serves to narrow our focus to that of a cybernetic Id: the collective embodiment of the prototypical addict, reduced to drinking their own toxic urine from a tube. (Having myself sought professional help over poisonous feedback loops involving substances that amongst other things included, uh, Netflix, I don’t use such metaphors lightly.) 

Of course, I’d merely shrug if such an approach weren’t already so sadly emblematic of where we’re at as a society. The dream of a perfectly closed loop of reactive idiocy won’t ever fully “work”, of course, but in this era of insta-populism and habit-forming media apparatuses that feed on our own bile, we’re nonetheless currently living the damage wreaked by such attempts. As strategists, designers and producers of culture, we should be doing everything we can to avoid this spiral into doom. 

Georgia Rowe, a service designer at the ABC, slyly mentioned at the same event that being sensitive to the breadth of people’s lived contexts would be, you know, essential to any kind of useful loop of engagement. Her respect for that universe of possibility within the pores of everyday life, rather than its reduction into more yet grist for the mill, has always been the progressive horizon of Human-Centred Design. But I’m not sure that this is enough to counterbalance the spectre before us: media landlords, populist strongmen and other disreputables, busily instrumentalising our data into some kind of zombie-reptilian autonomic nervous system of anti-culture. And it’s not Georgia’s individual responsibility to create a stronger antidote to such tendencies, either; shouldn’t we collectively be pushing harder in other directions?

In fact, I wonder these days if the “human context” we so often highlight has become a fig-leaf or alibi for our underlying zombie-reptile tendencies. Is the very popularisation of Human-Centred Design in the current juncture, which correlates so strongly with the rise of our current digital product overlords, itself a symptom of our predicament? As someone who cut their teeth as a Director of Design at Australia’s first social-purpose-focused Human-Centred Design studio, it’s not easy for me to say this, but our obsessive focus on fashioning usable, desirable products, and thus the methods we use to do this — including HCD — are imbricated in this short-circuit of desire, and exploited by the profiteers of our attention. Perhaps some spanners need to be thrown into the works, lest design is sucked into its own black hole.

Beneath the pavement: the rave

The second keynote at Re:Frame was from Seb Chan, the Chief Experience Officer at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. Seb’s work is thankfully all about creating the conditions for reigniting curiosity and community, rather than death-spiralling. (He’s also an exemplary citizen of the Republic of Newsletters; Fresh and New is essential reading for anyone interested in culture and technology, as well as having an interesting “pay to access the archives” business model. Go and subscribe, immediately. Seb’s also responsible for giving me the kick in the pants to post a new issue: “I like your newsletter,” he told me after his talk as I blushed prettily, “… WHEN IT COMES OUT.” Ahem.) 

Seb said a couple of slightly cryptic but suggestive things in his keynote that I think can help loosen design’s tendency to auto-asphyxiate under capitalism. Firstly, he noted that his design approach isn’t focused on reactively addressing “user needs”. (And he was also clear that neither is it about narrowly focusing on transactional interactions, as experience design so often is.) Secondly, he acknowledged that his current work in experience design inevitably draws from his background in organising electronic dance parties in the distant 20th Century — a different but related kind of “experience”. (No doubt some of you also remember going to Frigid in ‘90s Sydney. Good times!) Moreover, he provocatively described those events as “utopian, elite and exclusionary”. 

It might be surprising to hear a senior figure of a public cultural institution use terms that could be interpreted as “anti-democratic”, but that’s not really the angle here. Seb’s approach certainly isn’t about disregarding the needs of ACMI’s visitors, or making it the sole preserve of over-educated latté-belters. Rather, going beyond “user needs” opens up possibilities that would be foreclosed by seeing visitors as simply customers who need to be mechanically serviced. And by being underground, 20th Century electronic dance culture created pockets of safety that enabled sexual minorities to have space to flourish, outside the panopticon of the dominant culture. Subcultures therefore serve as an alternative model for conceiving of how we might experience public institutions and infrastructures. The upshot is not how to make museums more obscure, but how we can use this insight to create spaces of conviviality across our social terrain. 

In a recent newsletter, Seb put it this way: 

When people in the cultural sector talk about museums or libraries as aiming to become ‘town squares’ or similar, I wonder if they are missing a trick. A town square is where only the loudest voices can be heard. Perhaps a town square is not what is needed, but an ecology of smaller niches where smaller voices thrive? And the institutional role lies in being a facilitator of the connections between niches?

Essentially, this is about a different way to be public.

Beneath the pavement: limestone caves

Thinking about this thought-bomb, I’m reminded of nothing less than W.H. Auden’s magnificent 1948 poem “In Praise of Limestone”, which contrasts the gentle affordances of limestone caves with other, less forgiving geological spaces: 

“Come!" purred the clays and gravels, 

“On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers 

Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb 

In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both 

Need to be altered." 

Against a totalising, scorched-earth concept of public space, Auden yearns for his sensual pockets of limestone. He’s not uncritical — like anybody who’s grappled with the limits of the identity politics that sometimes come with subcultural niches, the poem is ambivalent about the indulgence and narcissism that such spaces can engender, but it’s suggestive of something much more interesting to me than the flattened, data-whispered zombie dystopia of The Public (Opinion) that appears to be all the rage these days.

More on publics and counterpublics next week! I’m currently in Melbourne for the sometimes-provocative SDNOW conference, and there’s too much to write about…

A sustainable portion of all my love,

Ben