#Working tools

[wytchoftheways]

The Snake Bone Necklace:

The snake is a very important symbol to west country witches and cunning folk, for the serpentine flow of nature has an important part in both spell making and in its spirit force.

A necklace make of snake skeleton with the colors of life, red being blood and blue being air or life force, makes this necklace a wonderful tool to utilize when going out into the land to gather “sprowl”, or in general workings

Blessed be! 🐍🕯️

[rayraythetraytrain]

From open-fingered gloves with lights in them to a beenie with a portable "head light', inventors keep making stuff that seems "silly" - until one discovers a unique functionality to which this stuff can be utilized - like under the hood of a car in total darkness when you need three hands - one to hold the flashlight and two to work on the repair.

FLY NAVY!

[thoodleoo]

i think the key to being a successful classroom teacher is having an ordinary classroom material (eg pen, highlighter, book) but in a really and truly ridiculous size and using it regularly without comment. nothing both throws off and enchants a student of any age than more than walking up to your desk to ask you a question and pausing with baffled uncertainty as they see you grading papers with a pen so large you cannot actually hold it the way you would normally hold a writing utensil. there is a brief moment as they look at you where you are able to raise an eyebrow and go "yes?" while acting like absolutely nothing is odd about the fact that you are currently writing with a multicolor my little pony pen that is half the girth of your forearm and in that moment you hold the most power in the entire school. use it wisely

[mochasucculent]

Was looking at refs and since Viktor has two different leg braces I was wondering, do we think he wears them simultaneously?? The refs don't perfectly line up perspective-wise so it's hard to tell but parts of the one he wears during the Hexcore scenes look like they could maybe line up with the brace that he wears over his clothes, but also some parts really don't and look like they'd be super uncomfy. Also HOW does he take these on and off. Experts weigh in

[frownyalfred]

my favorite thing in Justice League fics is when a character fucks up so badly that their only option is to go talk to Batman. And they still — still — take a moment to figure out how desperate they are before going.

Bruce has such “don’t bother me, I’m working, also why the hell would you do that” disapproving dad energy. It’s stunning.

[royaltea000]

“A thousand generations serve to praise…”

[doctorsiren]

God now I’m seriously thinking of an Undertale route with Spamton and Tenna, specifically how they would affect the ending phone call… I feel like if you kill Tenna, especially if you kill nobody else, Spamton goes completely insane forever. Maybe throws himself into the core again, like how Alphys dies if you kill Mettaton.

If you kill Spamton but fix Tenna, though, since Tenna doesn’t know he’s alive… maybe he joins Mettaton’s network but he’s hollow inside? Has no real purpose and no real friends, just shuts himself down every night alone. You know, a neutral ending!

Neutral Route if you kill only Tenna

Spamton spirals even further, tricking himself into believing that he can still fix Tenna, but he soon realizes that there’s nothing he can do. So I believe he would jump into the Core again or do SOMETHING. Either way, his shop is closed down after the player’s choice to kill Tenna.

Neutral Route if you kill only Spamton

I like that idea a lot. He’s always wants to help people and lift their spirits, so being a TV star after being repaired sounds perfect to him. Before his Spinel moment, he thought Spamton had died when he jumped into the core. And so, if the player kills Spamton and later repairs Tenna, Tenna will be conscious again still believing Spamton to have never been alive since the Core incident. However, he quickly finds the evidence of him all through the underground. His abandoned shop, his strange graffiti, and reports and rumours from other monsters that one of the old Royal Scientists used to leave all this stuff, but disappeared suddenly. Tenna realizes if he had just stayed awake and not shut himself off to fruitlessly wait for Chara and Asriel, he could have found Spamton and helped him. He wallows in regret and sits alone in his room every night, watching the same VHS tape over and over, which was filled with little moments of the Dreemurr family before everything went bad, including moments of Tenna and Spamton. …and I realized I could make them even more tragic if I made them fiancés, who then had a falling out before they even got married (the falling out being after Gaster fell into the core and Spamton started losing it and blaming Tenna to deflect his own guilt). Tenna doesn’t even care about the fight anymore and he’s not mad at Spamton. He just wishes he hadn’t been powered off for all those years while Spamton clearly still cared about him and had been trying to fix him up.

[hinamie]

@itafushi-week day six: rain | fantasy

I wanted to know you / and before I knew it, you became special

[i-cant-swim-actually]

POV: you're a guard assigned to the third prince sent from a defeated kingdom as a political hostage foster :^)

[kittyoverlord]

Parallel choreography in "Last Forever" and "Facade".

[blueskittlesart]

i hope everyone in nintendo’s management department dies and goes to hell no matter what and i’m not kidding

[plagueislost]

trying new coloring methods. 0/10 do NOT recommend, but hey at least i got something kinda okay out of it

[genericpuff]

Tbh at this point you should just make your own webcomic app/website because it would probably be 100 times better than whatever going on with webtoon right now.

hahaha it wouldn't tho, sorry 💀

Here's the fundamental issue with webcomic platforms that a lot of people just don't realize (and why they're so difficult to run successfully):

Storage costs are incredibly expensive, it's why so many sites have limitations on file sizes / page sizes / etc. because all of those images and site info have to be stored somewhere, which costs $$$.

Maintenance costs are expensive and get more so as you grow, you need people who are capable of fixing bugs ASAP and managing the servers and site itself

Financially speaking, webcomics are in a state of high supply, low demand. Loads of artists are willing to create their passion projects, but getting people to read them and pay for them is a whole other issue. Demand is high in the general sense that once people get attached to a webtoon they'll demand more, but many people aren't actually willing to go looking for new stuff to read and depend more on what sites feed them (and what they already like). There are a lot of comics to go around and thus a lot of competition with a limited audience of people willing to actually pay for them.

Trying to build a new platform from the ground up is incredibly difficult and a majority of sites fail within their first year. Not only do you have to convince artists to take a chance on your platform, you have to convince readers to come. Readers won't come if there isn't work on the platform to read, but artists won't come if they don't think the site will be worth it due to low traffic numbers. This is why the artists with large followings who are willing to take chances on the smaller sites are crucial, but that's only if you can convince them to use the site in favor of (or alongside) whatever platform they're using already where the majority of their audience lies. For many creators it's just not worth the time, energy, or risk.

Even if you find short-term success, in the long-term there are always going to be profit margins to maintain. The more users you pull in, the more storage is used by incoming artists, the more you have to spend on storage and server maintenance costs, and that means either taking the risk at crowdfunding (ex. ComicFury) or having to resort to outsider investments (ex. Tapas). Look at SmackJeeves, it used to be a titan in the independent webcomic hosting community, until it folded over to a buyout by NHN and then was pretty much immediately shuttered due to NHN basically turning it into a manwha scanlation site and driving away its entire userbase. And if you don't get bought out and try your hand at crowdfunding, you may just wind up living on a lifeline that could cut out at any moment, like what happened to Inkblazers (fun fact, the death of Inkblazers was what kicked off the cultural shift in Tapas around 2015-16 when all of IB's users migrated over and brought their work with them which was more aimed towards the BL and romancee drama community, rather than the comedy / gag-a-day culture that Tapas had made itself known for... now you deadass can't tell Tapas apart from a lot of scanlation sites because it got bought out by Kakao and kept putting all of its eggs into the isekai/romance drama basket.)

Right now the mindset in which artists and readers are operating is that they're trying way, way too hard to find a "one size fits all" site. Readers want a place where they can find all their favorite webtoons without much effort, artists wants a place where they can post to an audience of thousands, and both sides want a community that will feel tight-knit. But the reality is that you can't really have all three of those things, not on one site. Something always winds up having to be sacrificed - if a site grows big enough, it'll have to start seeking more funding while also cutting costs which will result in features becoming paywall'd, intrusive ads, creators losing their freedom, and/or outsider support which often results in the platform losing its core identity and alienating its tight-knit community.

If I had to describe what I'm talking about in a "pick one" graphic, it would look something like this:

(*note: this is mostly based on my own observations from using all of these sites at some point or another, they're not necessarily entirely accurate to the statistical performance of each site, I can only glean so much from experience and traffic trackers LMAO that said I did ask some comic pals for input and they were very helpful in helping me adjust it with their own takes <3).

The homogenization of the Internet has really whipped people into submission for the "big sites" that offer "everything", but that's never been the Internet, it relies on being multi-faceted and offering different spaces for different purposes. And we're seeing that ideology falter through the enshittification of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. where users are at odds with the platforms because the platforms are gutting features in an attempt to satisfy shareholders whom without the platforms would not exist. Like, most of us aren't paying money to use social media sites / comic platform sites, so where else are they gonna make the necessary funds to keep these sites running? Selling ad space and locking features behind paywalls.

And this is especially true for a lot of budding sites that don't have the audience to support them via crowdfunding but also don't have the leverage to ask for investments - so unless they get really REALLY lucky in EITHER of those departments, they're gonna be operating at a loss, and even once they do achieve either of those things there are gonna be issues in the site's longevity, whether it be dying from lack of growing crowdfunding support or dying from shareholder meddling.

So what can we do?

We can learn how to take our independence back. We don't have to stop using these big platforms altogether as they do have things to offer in their own way, particularly their large audience sizes and dipping into other demographics that might not be reachable from certain sites - but we gotta learn that no single site is going to satisfy every wish we have and we have to be willing to learn the skills necessary to running our own spaces again. Pick up HTML/CSS, get to know other people who know HTML/CSS if you can't grasp it (it's me, I can't grasp it LOL), be willing to take a chance on those "smaller sites" and don't write them off entirely as spaces that can be beneficial to you just because they don't have large numbers or because they don't offer rewards programs. And if you have a really polished piece of work in your hands, look into agencies and publishing houses that specialize in indie comics / graphic novels, don't settle for the first Originals contract that gets sent your way.

For the last decade corporations have been convincing us that our worth is tied to the eyes we can bring to them. Instead of serving ourselves, we've begun serving the big guys, insisting that it has to be worth something eventually and that it'll "payoff" simply by the virtue of gambler's fallacy. Ask yourself what site is right for you and your work rather than asking yourself if your work is good enough for them. Most of us are broke trying to make it work on these sites anyways, may as well be broke and fulfilled by posting in places that actually suit us and our work if we can. Don't define your success by what sites like Webtoons are enforcing - that definition only benefits them, not you.

[sparticus2000art]

It’s my favourite little guy!

Horror sans!

I wanted to go for something a little more moody/spooky but I’m not sure if I quite hit that… the colours look pretty neat at least!

(Please also ignore how long it’s been since I’ve posted/drawn anything…)

[chasiufan]

Nobody’s gonna buy ur 599$ marketable plushie stop tryna sell it to us -_-